Does Simon's 1986 McKinsey Quarterly interview contain the 'intuition = fast recognition' passage verbatim?
The question. claim-simon-defines-expert-intuition-as-domain-bound-recognition rests on the quote "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," attributed to Herbert Simon's 1986 McKinsey Quarterly interview but read only via a Farnam Street essay (https://fs.blog/2011/09/on-expertness-and-intuition/) carrying the quote.
Why it matters. This is the foundational definitional claim for a whole
cluster of notes — it also underlies
observation-simon-intuition-framework-diagnoses-perceptron-sterility-conjecture.
A mechanism claim about cognition should clear a Tier 1–2 sourcing floor per
00-meta/specs/sources.md; right now it sits on a Tier 3 carrier only.
What would answer it. Locate the original 1986 McKinsey Quarterly interview text (may require a library database or McKinsey's own archive), or a scan/quotation of it in Simon's Sciences of the Artificial (ch. 2), which is reported to develop the same idea and may be more accessible.
Candidate next moves. Search McKinsey's digital archive; check whether Sciences of the Artificial is excerpted anywhere with the matching passage; Google Scholar / Google Books search on the exact phrase.
Progress — 2026-08-29 (from promotion of
10-inbox/raw/2026-08-29-does-simons-1986-mckinsey-quarterly-interview-contain-the.md).
Narrowed, not answered — stays open. Established this session: (a) the quote's only
online citation trail is Farnam Street's footnote naming a specific title, "How Managers
Express their Creativity, Autumn 1986, The McKinsey Quarterly" — recorded in
claim-simon-intuition-quote-traces-to-undigitized-1986-mckinsey-article; (b) that
primary is undigitized and unlocated (not on McKinsey's site, Internet Archive,
HathiTrust, or Google Books) — a manual-consultation item, so the parent note's Tier 3
status is correctly assessed, not under-searched; (c) every trail describes it as an
article, not an "interview," so even the format in this question's title is
unconfirmed; (d) a distinct, better-attested 1992 Psychological Science Simon quote may
be getting conflated with it — see
claim-two-distinct-simon-intuition-quotes-1986-mckinsey-and-1992-psych-science-conflated
and the new question-verify-simon-1992-psych-science-intuition-recognition-quote.
The core verbatim question — does the actual 1986 McKinsey text contain the passage —
remains unresolved and likely needs microfilm or McKinsey's physical archive.
Progress — 2026-08-30 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5; logged in
00-meta/audits/audit-scheduled-2026-08-30-opus-1.md). Still open; two leads added,
neither one an answer. First, the Farnam Street footnote was independently re-read on
the live page and confirms the attributing title exactly as recorded, and the
false-match ruling on Akande is now corroborated against a bibliographic record rather
than inferred: RePEc entry eme/ijmpps/eum0000000000893 gives "How Managers Express
Their Creativity", Adebowale Akande, International Journal of Manpower 12(7), 1991,
pp. 17–19, doi:10.1108/EUM0000000000893 — same title, different author, journal and
year, so the exclusion holds. Second, an unevaluated candidate digitization exists that
the 2026-08-29 sweep did not cover: a Scribd upload titled "How Managers Express Their
Creativity" (scribd.com/document/56929415, uploader "Elyes Elyes"), whose visible
preview text is thematically Simon — creativity as the product of a decade's practice
and roughly 50,000 stored "chunks" — but which shows no author, no publication and no
date, and whose preview does NOT contain the "We usually use the word 'intuition'"
sentence. It is a lead, not a receipt: an unattributed re-upload cannot establish the
McKinsey text's wording even if it turns out to be that text, and it would not clear the
sourcing floor for a mechanism claim. Worth one look by a session that can page through
the whole document; worth nothing cited as-is. A third untested route: Simon's 1987
Academy of Management Executive article "Making Management Decisions: the Role of
Intuition and Emotion" (1(1):57–64, doi:10.5465/ame.1987.4275905) is a digitized,
citable venue from the same period on the same subject, and if it carries the passage it
would give the cluster the Tier 1 anchor the McKinsey ghost cannot.