Hunch Mining

Abstract

Intuition and hunches are important tools for experts who make time-critical highly complex decisions in turbulent environments. However, hunches are also elusive and exist below the surface when not being used for immediate decision making. These latent hunches are valuable and can lead to creative solutions outside of a crisis. This paper uses a demonstration experiment to show how hunches can be “mined” using revealed causal mapping techniques. Fifty chief information officers and 88 programmer/analysts were interviewed during a very turbulent time in their organizations. The hunch mining results indicate that hunches can be found throughout experts' communications and can serve as valuable insights into strategic and tactical decision making. This research serves as the first manual step in developing natural language processing artificial intelligence tools for automated hunch mining in expert communications. Request access from your librarian to read this article's full text.