The story of Wag Dodge and power of intuition in Decision Making

In the late 1940s, a number of smokejumpers died in a forest fire in Mann Gulch, Montana. It's a story, a tragedy, that teaches us a lot about the power of intuition and also some of the dangers when we use intuition to make decisions.

Wag Dodge was the foreman of that crew. They jumped from an airplane to fight a forest fire in Mann Gulch back in the late 1940s, and they thought it was a routine fire at first. Within an hour, however, Dodge realized, as the most experienced member of the crew, that they were facing what's called a "blow-up," that this fire would chase them at a rapid speed, and they needed to try to escape. And so they all began running for the ridge at his direction.

Soon he realized that they couldn't make it to the ridge, or at least many of them wouldn't be able to outrun the fire. Not knowing what to do, he quickly came up with, invented a strategy on the spot, something never done before in the history of fighting forest fires. He lit a match and he threw it into some grass in an area that wasn't wooded at all and that grass area burned very quickly and he ended up with a burned out area of dirt — and he lay in it. And he called all his team members to lay in the dirt as well. They all looked at him like he was a madman, with the fire chasing them. They said, "How could you stop and do that?" And they ran for the ridge and all but two of them died being chased down by this blaze.

Wag Dodge got up after the fire had just gone right over him and dusted himself off and he was perfectly healthy. He had deprived the blaze of any fuel by burning out that area of grass, and thus he'd survived. He'd used intuition, his gut instinct.

What is intuition? It's the ability to recognize patterns based on past experience. To see a situation, and then be able to relate it to other things you've done in the past. And then either be able to come up with the right strategy or pluck a strategy from something that's worked in the past in your own experience.

That's what he did: He related this to a variety of conditions and experiences that he had been through. And he invented something on the spot. And that's the power of intuition, our ability to do that. But there is a danger here as well. Wag Dodge didn't know his crew very well.

He hadn't built a lot of trust with them. And he didn't have a lot 

of time to communicate the rationale behind his decision.

And that's one of the risks when we make intuitive decisions, people don't understand our thought process. It's not like when we go through a big formal analysis where they can follow the steps. With intuition, it's this lightning bolt. They don't understand: How did you come to that conclusion? And therefore they don't buy into it and they don't follow our leadership. And therefore even though it was a brilliant strategy, a brilliant choice, no one else took it, and many of them died.