I have been using some version of the Three Door process for over fifteen years in a variety of industries and it has helped me deliver top quality results for my employers and clients.
Each door, the Logical, the Intuitive and the Emotional, requires a unique perspective that collectively comes close to an optimal solution.
The Logical process is easiest to describe. A logical perspective works brilliantly to solve problems where the system can be defined in terms of internally consistent and clearly defined rules and tradeoffs. Often this means data and mathematics, including statistics and probability.
Today’s tendency to be “data driven” is often used as an excuse to stop thinking when there isn’t a lot of high-quality data. But a great deal can be accomplished nevertheless, by clear thinking and an intuitive mindset. Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein both attributed their colossal success to intuition rather than conventional intellect. Einstein clearly felt that the intuitive was more powerful than the logical, saying “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant”.
Opportunity in the stock market, for example, is often found in such situations where the ideal kind of data to answer a question simply does not exist, and one must look for analogous situations and how they played out. The entrepreneur’s process of creating something entirely new, as described in Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, is another example of intuition at work.
Because humans are highly emotional creatures (myself included) considering problems from an emotional perspective can be exceedingly helpful, especially when isolated from the other two mindsets. Examining emotional thinking in yourself can help avoid flawed decisions, and in others predict what they are likely to do and when. For example, the fear and greed of the stock market are emotion working in aggregate, as is politics. Organizational culture hopefully harnesses good emotions like passion for the work and team pride, but in practice often fails due to emotional reasons such as groupthink or “not invented here” syndrome.