Simon's 'intuition = recognition' quote traces only to one 1986 McKinsey Quarterly article title, whose primary text is undigitized and unlocated online

herbert-simonexpert-intuitionmckinsey-quarterlyquote-verificationprimary-source-verification

The passage that grounds claim-simon-defines-expert-intuition-as-domain-bound-recognition — "We usually use the word 'intuition' ... to refer to this ability of experts to respond to situations in their domains of expertise almost instantaneously and relatively accurately" — is attributed, in the only citation trail located online, to a single named title: the Farnam Street essay's footnote (2) cites it to "How Managers Express their Creativity, Autumn 1986, The McKinsey Quarterly." No page, issue, or volume is given, and no second source independently repeats that bibliographic detail; every online repetition of the quote traces back to the same handful of secondary carriers, not to an independent sighting of the primary.

Two consequences follow. First, the attribution names a specific article, not an "interview" — every citation trail found describes "How Managers Express their Creativity" as an article, so the "interview" framing common in secondary retellings is itself unconfirmed. (A same-titled 1991 paper by Adebowale Akande in the International Journal of Manpower shares only the title and was ruled out as a false match.) Second, the Autumn 1986 McKinsey Quarterly piece could not be located in any digitized archive as of 2026-08-29 — not on McKinsey's own site (whose digital past- issues archive does not reach back to 1986), the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, or Google Books. McKinsey Quarterly was reportedly internal-only in its early run, which would explain the absence, so the Tier 3 status of the parent definition note is correctly assessed, not an artifact of insufficient searching: the primary is a manual-consultation item (library microfilm or McKinsey's physical archive) that web search cannot substitute for. [unverified-quote — needs primary]

A candidate resolving route: Simon's 1985 chapter "What We Know About the Creative Process" (in R. L. Kuhn, ed., Frontiers in Creative and Innovative Management, Ballinger) carries near-identical language and, if the McKinsey piece is an adapted excerpt of it, could settle the wording even while the McKinsey text stays inaccessible. The distinct-but-conflatable 1992 quote is treated in claim-two-distinct-simon-intuition-quotes-1986-mckinsey-and-1992-psych-science-conflated.