The students are faced with a situation for them to analyze.
Situation:
Violet Jones is a manager at the Intestinal Distress Tacos fast food restaurant. She has noticed that the taco shells are disappearing at a faster rate than the sales. There are some ways that Violet can investigate the missing taco shells. Violet does not have the time in her business managerial schedule to spend a long time investigating the taco shell mystery. She is losing money daily and must fire the individual responsible. She has relied on her intuition in the past, and it has successfully rewarded her into management positions. She uses patterns of behavior, cues, and body language.
Students are to formulate an intuitive decision/conclusion from the situation above.
Student 1: For Violet to solve this case, she must undertake these series of decisions. Because she doesn't have the luxury to spend a long time to investigate, I have devised a series of investigatory cues that can be done in one day. First step is to check the schedule of her workers. She must see who are the people involved in the delivery, storage, preparation, and distribution of the taco shells. If done, the second step is to check the number of taco shells as they go through each stage. If done correctly, she must be able to see where the taco shells' number is dropping, for different figures will show in the log. She then can narrow the culprit down by investigating the people working in that certain process. There will be problems such as having consistent figures in the log, in that case, the culprit must reside within the middle management whom oversee each process for they are the only ones who can access the logs. Other scenarios might will be easy to tackle upon considering Violet's experience in the job.
Student 2: From the case given above, clearly shows that one of her employees is stealing their produce. Violet believes an employee has stolen from her company, and she needs solid evidence of the theft. Depending on the seriousness of the theft, she may find it necessary to temporarily suspend an employee while an investigation is conducted, but she cannot fire an employee simply based on suspicion. So of course for her, she needs to gather evidence like video and digital evidence which are strong. Questioning a witness or every employee would be also appropriate. When all evidence is gathered, the rest is up to her to decide.
Student 3: Violet Jones decided to observe all her employees' behavior patterns to find the culprit. Upon observing, she noticed that Kiefer, his chef has been acting strange. Her instincts tell her that Kiefer might be the taco shells thief since he has the most access in the food storage. Furthermore, the chef always spends a long break and disappears. Thus, Violet concluded that he is consuming the taco shells during those times.
Who among the 3 students followed the instructions?
Student 1 and 2 were thinking strategically. They both formulated plans that would utilize steps to be able to gain evidences and solve the problem eventually. Strategic thinking is used when all aspects of the situation are laid at hand and your job is to use those facts to come up with a strategy to solve problem. Therefore, time is a very important consideration when using strategic analysis. Although, both students were able to come up with brilliant plans, they failed to consider the use of intuition in their analysis which the instruction clearly states.
Student 3 on the other hand, was more intuitive although she tried to present her answer in the form of a possible scenario that could happen when intuition is used. Intuitive thinking is usually used when very limited to no facts were presented so consequences are also not clear. This strategy requires the use of intuition or gut feeling in solving a situation. Thus, it does not require a considerable amount of time to be able to solve a problem using this because it is used at the spur of the moment for an immediate result.
In conclusion, in whatever situation we face, it is very important to be able to use both mind and heart in dealing with them. We could be all rational but the heart could also give considerable advise that could help in solving a problem.