Which brings me to the question - have you improved your intuition (I don't know what other word to use)? Do you use it more than hardcore fact analysis for decision making? In other words, what tools do you use other than hard core fact based analysis for making decisions?
As it relates to this community, one area where I think quantitative analysis can be extremely limiting is in project management. I've seen processes where PMs take dozens or hundreds of tasks, subjectively evaluate a ton of values ("cost", "urgency", "importance", "impact"...) for each, and then use those to "calculate" prioritization.
In reality each task has at least thousands of deeply inter-related strategic and interpersonal dimensions, so any view we can quantify will be myopic. Other important dimensions include: "this task is a nightmare and the only person who can take it is Bob, who is key talent that is burnt out right now and might quit", "item A will greatly decrease in cost if we wait a few weeks, but only if we assign out item B to Person X because it's blocking and they can do it five times faster.", and "this task will help develop skills that I think are likely to be strategically important in six months, but only if we assign other items that leverage that strategic advantage".
Every variation on these that you can imagine is a dimension, and some of them are far more important than anything that you can easily quantify.
The human brain isn't good at this form of high-dimensional mathematical analysis. It is, however, extremely good at pattern-matching this intuitively. I have yet to see a project management process that performs better than someone with good intuition sitting down and deciding on gutfeel in 1/10th the time.
To develop hyper-cognition study hypnosis[1]. To develop the second kind you could try "Core Transformation' process[2].
They are old but check out "Superlearning 2000" and "Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain" both by Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder
[1] I can recommend "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder and "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" by Steven Heller.
I'm not sure this needs explaining though - most real people don't make decisions based on data most of the time. We make decisions based on experience, received knowledge (eg advice) or gut instinct.
Where most people fall down (I would say) is not letting go of failed models.
This sounds a lot like experience. Say someone's been programming for decades, solved all kinds of problems and encountered all kinds of obscure bugs. Maybe they see your issue, they've seen something like it before, but they don't remember exactly what or when, just that it's familiar. So they quickly find the solution but it just "feels right" - intuition.
First you have to ask yourself if you are sufficiently experienced with the topic. How many times have you seen this or a highly similar situation before? Did you guess then validate in those situations? If you consider it sufficient or are looking to acquire the intuition you invest the time guessing. After guessing you try to guess what accuracy you expect your guess to have. THEN you do the validation or analysis to see how well you did.
More often than not I'm almost completely wrong and I imagine my intuition to be highly accurate. It's very humbling. I learn not to depend on it.
I've seen others do much better to the point it looks like magic.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecastin...
It has a good section in the appendix about things you can do to improve your forecasting accuracy.
How can one objectively track performance in an immeasurable property?
Once you achieve a high level of mastery and experience your area of work, intuition, seems a lot more relevant and reliable. Here are some clear visual examples in sports (but they apply to all disciplines i firmly believe):
Example1: How is Cristiano Ronaldo such a phenomenal elite soccer player? - https://youtu.be/4achmhzLNoY?t=1060
Example2: How are master level chess players able to calculate positions almost instantly or recall game positions from a long time ago?I found this conversation with Tim Ferris and Josh Waitzkin might pique your curiosity and they talk about intuition in sports and business. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r6gr7uytQA
TLDR of whole response: topic mastery and experience really help develop intuition
Recent personal example of building intuition for me:
I have been doing a lot of programming contest questions. Initially I was getting stumped on how to approach the problems that kept re-appearing again and again. After so much repeated failure, I felt what I was missing was an understanding of underlying principles and patterns for certain coding questions. I found a resource online and discovered there were lots of topics I had never heard of in these programming contests / coding interview problems like “sliding window”, “2 pointer” etc….
After I started drilling down on those types of problems I struggled with, when I encountered new unseen or familiar looking questions my mind was able to *immediately suggest to me an approach towards solving the problem. Before It would take me a long time to decide how I was going to approach the problem and it was because I lacked knowledge and depth in the area I was working in.