SECTION A
Essay
125 marks
Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic.
WRITE IN
90 min
1,000–1,200 words
Reading the topic
The topic claims that far-sighted decisions come neither from gut feeling alone nor from calculation alone, but where the two meet. The examiner expects an essay on how intuition, built from experience, spots possibilities that data cannot yet show, while logic tests and disciplines those hunches.
ThesisVisionary decisions arise when experienced intuition proposes a bold direction and rigorous logic tests it, and leaders fail when they trust either faculty alone.
Dimensions to cover
- 1Psychology: fast intuitive judgement and slow deliberate reasoning are complementary systems, each prone to errors the other can catch
- 2Military leadership: timing a campaign often rests on a commander's feel for terrain and morale, but that feel must be justified by logistics
- 3Public policy: bold missions such as dairy cooperatives began as intuitive bets on farmers' capacity, then succeeded through careful institutional design
- 4Business: founders often act on an untested sense of what customers will want, while investors and data force that intuition to prove itself
- 5Technology: AI can supply pattern-based logic at scale, but deciding which problems are worth solving still rests on human judgement and values
- 6Ethics: moral intuition flags what feels wrong, and reasoned argument decides whether that discomfort reflects a real injustice or a prejudice
Counter-view
- A strong counter is that intuition is merely bias in disguise and that evidence-based decision-making should replace it. The essay should concede that untrained intuition misleads, but argue that expert intuition is compressed experience and that data cannot set goals or imagine futures that do not yet exist
Open and close
- Open: Begin with Manekshaw telling a Prime Minister in April 1971 that he would not go to war yet, a refusal that looked like hesitation but combined instinct with hard logistical reasoning
- Close: End by arguing that vision is intuition that has survived the test of logic, and that institutions should train both rather than worship either
Where marks usually go
- Writing only a management essay on corporate strategy and ignoring governance, ethics and history
- Presenting intuition and logic as opposites and picking a winner, when the topic insists on their intersection
- Using hindsight to call every successful gamble 'visionary' without showing how logic tested it beforehand
Examples that fit
- HistoryIn April 1971 General Sam Manekshaw advised Indira Gandhi to delay military action until winter, combining his instinct about readiness with logic about monsoons and Himalayan passes; the December campaign succeeded.Official histories of the 1971 war; Ministry of Defence accounts
- ThinkerDaniel Kahneman describes System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, analytical) thinking and shows how good decisions require the second to check the first.Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011)
- CaseVerghese Kurien's faith that small dairy farmers could compete with large firms was intuitive, but Operation Flood, launched in 1970, rested on detailed cooperative and supply-chain planning.National Dairy Development Board, history of Operation Flood
- ThinkerHerbert Simon's idea of bounded rationality explains why decision-makers cannot calculate every option and must rely partly on experienced judgement.Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize in Economics (1978), nobelprize.org
- HistoryDuring the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy rejected immediate air strikes and chose a naval quarantine after structured debate in his advisory committee, pairing instinctive caution with tested reasoning.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Cuban Missile Crisis records