109
8
inTuiTion and cRisis
leadeRship
ERIC J. MCNULTY,
LEONARDJ. MARCUS,AND
BARRY C. DORN
National Preparedness Leadership Initiative
Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government Center for Public Leadership
8.1 Introduction
Forty years ago, Russell Ackoff cautioned against equating analysis
withthought (Ackoff, 1973). Although his talk was given long before
today’s pervasive data analysis and even before most of us had ever inter-
acted with a computer, his understanding of the limits of reductionist
mechanistic thinking that characterized the Industrial Age is at the heart
of the battle between data-driven and intuition-based decision making.
Do we make the best decisions by breaking the whole down into ever-
smal