Consider the following scenario: You have several job offers. Three of them are equally attractive, so you have a tough decision to make. Where do you begin?

You usually start with the facts, poring over the details, scrutinizing, hashing and rehashing. Wanting to make the right choice, you put your trust in logic and objectivity. Your thinking is orderly, calculated, step-by-step.

As the process continues, you get a gut feeling that one offer, perhaps with fewer benefits and a lower salary, is the best bet. A flash of intuition blazes across your mind. You immediately realize that this impulse has nothing to do with the merits of each offer, but for some reason it feels right.

What do you do -- go with it, logic be damned? Or shrug it off and keep on weighing the pros and cons of each offer?

If that flash in your mind seems too simple, if you say to yourself that hunches are no match for cool objectivity, you may be discounting your most dependable decision-making tool. Evidence is mounting that intuition works particularly well in choice situations. It silently compares and contrasts your options and signals the direction you should take.

Professor John Mihalasky and his associates at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark tested hundreds of business managers for intuitive ability. They are convinced that effective, superior decision making correlates highly with intuitive ability.

For one of their experiments, they chose 25 managers who had held top decision-making jobs for five years. All were from small manufacturing companies (less than $50 million in sales) to ensure that their decision making hadn't been diffused by committees.

The results were remarkable: Of the 25 men selected, 12 had doubled their companies' profits in five years. Eleven of those 12 scored high on the intuitive test.

The same correlation has been noted by other management researchers. Weston H. Agor, author of "Intuitive Management: Integrating Left and Right Brain Management Skills," studied several thousand managers from a wide cross section of industries and companies. He found that successful managers make effective use of intuitive decision-making. Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at Montreal's McGill University, likewise found that in unpredictable and ambiguous situations, successful managers rely on hunches to deal with problems that are "too complex for rational analysis."

The word intuition comes from Latin intuire, which roughly means looking, regarding, or knowing from within. Intuitive thinking doesn't advance in careful, well-defined steps. Rather, it involves a global perception of the problem. An intuitive person arrives at answers with little awareness of the process by which they were reached.

An intuitive hunch often is accompanied by a sense of compulsion. You feel a need to act immediately. Even while engaged in some other task, you often get distracted and return to thoughts of implementing your hunch. More often than not, you'd be wise to heed these promptings.

Some people are better at tuning into intuitive approaches than others. The following general rules are compiled from the practices of successful intuitive thinkers.

Watch for bias. Don't confuse intuitive thinking with personal subjectivity, which often emerges as a result of prejudices, biases, fears, fantasies or purely emotional reactions. Constant analysis of your thinking is the only way to winnow genuine intuitive grain from emotional chaff.

Keep a record. To determine how strong your intuitive ability is, keep a record of your intuitive insights, or hunches, as they occur. Rate them objectively. If a reasonable number have worked out, cultivate and pay attention to your intuitions.

Diary-keeping is the best way to separate genuine intuitive hunches from wishful projections. If you discover that many of your hunches turn out to be wrong, take stock. Try to learn how your personal interests, wishes, fears and anxieties tend to distort your perceptions and block the way to clear and valid intuitions.

It's a normal function. Realize that intuitive thinking is a normal function of the brain, not a euphemism for clairvoyance, mystical precognition or similar questionable phenomena.

Intuitive thinking requires thorough spadework on a problem. You've got to have the basic facts and information before intuitive processes can take over. Jerome S. Bruner of Harvard University says, "Individuals who have extensive familiarity with a subject matter appear more often to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution of a problem -- one which later proves to be appropriate."

A combined approach. Use intuitive and analytic modes of thought in combination. The intuitive mode isn't opposed to the rational, cognitive mode, but complements it. Typically, intuitive insights both precede and follow the exhaustive use of analysis, reason and logic.

Depending on the problem, decide which mode is most appropriate. Where the intuitive mode is used first, the analytic mode should be tried afterward. In fact, all intuitive thinking should be subsequently transposed into linear, logical order for articulation and implementation.

Analyze and wait. Genuine intuitive insights are not under conscious control or will. You can't predict when they'll come. So tackle problems consciously. Learn as much about them as you can using the analytic processes. Acquire all known data. Laziness often is the source of faulty hunches.

The intuitive hunch may come in a flash while you're tackling the problem, or later when the problem is put aside. The common expression "sleep on it" refers to allowing the intuitive-incubative processes to take over problem-solving.

Many people report finding solutions to apparently intractable problems either in the morning upon awakening, or during reverie or daydreaming. One reason for this is intuition's ability to delve into the subconscious, where everything one has learned and experienced, both consciously and subliminally, is stored. Tapping into this rich storehouse enables one to perceive unrealized possibilities inherent in many complex situations or problems.

Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine, said: "It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it, and rely upon it. It's my partner." After tedious, long-drawn-out experiments seeking ways to immunize against polio, Dr. Salk made one morning, upon awakening, an intuitive leap to the correct vaccine.

The important thing is to recognize the value of the intuitive hunch when it occurs. Don't brush it aside or dismiss it as something irrational or unnatural. "Cosmic fishing" is what R. Buckminster Fuller calls intuition. "You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish. Too many people get a hunch, then light up a cigarette and forget about it."

Use and act upon your intuitions. They can be your spring-board for successfully attaining your desired goals.