charts or frameworks. They look for calm. They look for someone who understands how the organization really works, not just how it is drawn on paper.
Business continuity may be documented in plans and manuals, but in practice it lives in people. It is knowing which processes truly matter when pressure rises. It is knowing which systems can fail without consequence and which failures will bring everything else down. It is knowing which colleagues will remain steady when uncertainty rises, and which ones will struggle despite impressive titles. This is where intuition becomes visible and legitimate.
Business continuity is intuition formalized. It takes experience, observation, and judgment and gives them structure. It asks you to separate what is theoretical from what is real. It forces you to prioritize without sentiment, while still remaining human.
In those rooms, during simulations and real incidents alike, I saw clearly that risk management is not about reacting faster than everyone else. It is about seeing earlier. It is about recognizing weak signals before they grow loud. It is about trusting that quiet sense that tells you where attention belongs when everything seems urgent. When time disappears, intuition fills the gap.
Leading Credit Risk: Intuition Under Scrutiny
When I became Head of Credit Risk, responsible for the entire cycle from origination through to recovery, intuition changed again. The challenge was no longer only about sensing danger in transactions or portfolios. It was about navigating leadership itself. About fighting for the right tools, the right people, and the right systems at senior leadership level, often in environments where priorities collided and patience ran thin.
Here, intuition was less about spotting early warning signals and more about timing. You learn to sense when to push an issue forward and when to hold back. You learn to tell the difference between genuine disagreement and unspoken fear. You begin to recognize when resistance comes from capacity limits, political pressures, or simple discomfort with change, rather than from logic or merit. None of this is written into policy manuals.
At that level, persuasion becomes a risk skill. Knowing how to frame an argument, when to escalate it, and when to let it settle quietly can make the difference between a vulnerability being addressed early or becoming a serious problem later. Push too hard and you lose allies. Wait too long and the window closes.
What helped me most was not technical mastery alone, although that mattered. It was the ability to read the room. To hear what was not said. To trust experience when momentum felt premature or silence felt dangerous.
In senior leadership spaces, intuition is constantly under scrutiny. It must be defended, explained, and sometimes softened so it can be heard. But when exercised with discipline and humility, it becomes one of the most reliable tools a risk leader has, quietly guiding decisions that no spreadsheet can capture.
So, What Is Intuition, and What Is It Not
Let us be clear. Intuition is often misunderstood, even by experienced leaders. It is not guesswork. It is not emotion. It is not the absence of data, and it is certainly not a convenient excuse for ignoring facts that make you uncomfortable. When intuition is reduced to impulse or mood, it becomes unreliable and dangerous.
True intuition is something else entirely. It is compressed experience. It is pattern recognition formed slowly over years, through repeated exposure to situations that on the surface look different but beneath share a familiar rhythm. It is the mind connecting dots faster than language allows, drawing on decades of observation, judgment, success, failure, and reflection.
In practice, intuition often shows up quietly. It might be a pause in a meeting, a tightening in the chest, or a subtle unease when a story just does not fit. It does not shout. It whispers. I have felt it in boardrooms, in credit committees, in recovery cases, and even when standing on a training field with young athletes. It signals before you can articulate why. As one seasoned pilot once put it,“ Experience is what allows you to recognize trouble before you can explain it.” I have felt that same whisper many times, long before reports, dashboards, or ratios confirmed what was coming.
But intuition is not flawless. It has enemies, and they are subtle. Ego can masquerade as confidence. Bias can present itself as experience. Overconfidence creeps quietly out of past successes. Nostalgia can trap a leader into believing that what worked before must work again. These forces can distort intuition as easily as they can refine it.
That is why intuition must be challenged, not worshipped. It must be tested against evidence, discussed openly, and exposed to honest dissent. The goal is not to silence it, but to discipline it. To make sure it serves judgment rather than replaces it. When intuition is paired with humility and curiosity, it becomes a powerful ally. When left unchecked, it can become a liability.
Risk management at its best lives in that balance. It respects data without being enslaved by it. It listens to intuition without surrendering to it. And it recognizes that some of the most important signals arrive quietly, long before they can be fully explained.
Today: Boards, Training Rooms, and the First Fifteen Minutes
In my current work, consulting, training, and board induction I encounter intuition every single day. Boards and senior teams size you up almost immediately, often within the first fifteen minutes. They are asking silently: Does this person understand our world? Can they add value? Are we safe listening to them? You feel it long before they speak.
I have walked into rooms where expectations were thick in the air, almost tangible. Just recently, at the last 2025 Nairobi Marketers’ Night, I was giving a talk on Toxic Culture. From the moment I entered, the audience’ s faces spoke louder than words. The message was unmistakable: This had better be worth it. Their energy, their skepticism, their quiet anticipation was all visible.
Arriving early at the venue, I took time to read the room, to sense the mood building as people settled in and awaited for the speakers of the evening. Intuition whispered that I needed to adjust my approach. I set aside slides and data tables, letting go of the structured plan I had rehearsed. Instead, I offered a simple, human talk. I shared stories, lived experiences, and reflections that I knew would resonate. It was not a dialogue in the interactive sense, with back-and-forth discussion, but a talk shaped by the audience’ s energy, a talk that met them where they were, human to human.
This, too, is risk management. It is the risk of relevance, of credibility, and of impact. In rooms filled with experienced professionals, senior executives, or board members, the stakes are never just about content. They are about trust, attention, and belief. Intuition is what guides you
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