So that's why wives are usually right

John Watson

Well, well, well, academia has actually produced something useful.

Research at Birmingham's Aston University not only supports the theory that the likelihood of a headphone cable getting into a tangle increases exponentially with its length; it suggests a solution. Tie the two ends together and the chance of its knotting is hugely reduced.

Formal proof will depend on some difficult mathematics. The odd thing is my wife thought everyone already knew the answer and has been tying the ends of all manner of cords, chains and wires for years.

Now my wife comes from near Wanganui and it is just possible that the complex mathematics required to prove the Frisch-Wassermann-Delbruck conjecture, for that is its formal name, has been secretly cracked by the residents of the area. On the other hand, it may be that intuition enables them to jump to the result without struggling through the underlying theory.

Quite how people jump to answers without going through the logical steps is one of life's deeper mysteries. It could be that they make lucky guesses but, if that is so, some people are blessed with luck to an unlikely extent. After all, if the chance of guessing right once is evens, then the chance of doing it twice running is one in four; three times running, one in eight; four times, one in 16 ... But some people (especially wives) do it over and over again.

No, it cannot just be chance. When Napoleon said "give me lucky generals" he didn't really mean generals who would win at roulette but rather those whose intuitive judgments brought victory as opposed to those who were unsuccessful because their thinking was tramlined into the obvious logical paths.

Actually intuitive processes are everywhere. Experienced interviewers will tell you that often they know the result of the interview before the candidate has sat down and that what follows merely confirms their instant conclusion. That isn't luck or arrogance. It is some process of the unconscious mind that taps into patterns and experience.

One sees something similar in investment management. After all, a stock market price is based on investors doing their sums and, as the methods they use are much the same, most of them will take similar views. All except a few, that is, and those who depart from the maths to follow successful hunches are the ones who make the real money.

If Napoleon, an administrative genius if ever there was one, rated intuition so highly, perhaps we should think about how best to encourage it. Modern management systems are a problem here because they subject decisions to a scrutiny which intuitive judgments are ill-placed to bear. If you override the logical arguments because your guts tell you that the answer is wrong, it is going to be difficult to defend your conclusion. After all, you may hardly understand it yourself. It is just that some obscure combination of experience, genius and goodness knows what else guides you beyond the received wisdom.

Perhaps this was the key to the economic failure of communism. Perhaps the main problem was not so much the lack of freedom, incentives and market disciplines at all but just a stifling of intuitive thinking by bureaucracy. If that is right, we in the EU had better look out because the tool being used to gather power at the centre is a plethora of regulation. It chokes initiative. It tangles round everything. It strangles business. If only we could straighten it out by tying the two ends together.

Before retiring, John Watson was a partner in an international law firm. He now writes from Islington, London