To go one step more the team is also acting on their intuition -- they haven't fully used deductive reasoning to come up with their own solution to the problem,

To go one step more the team is also acting on their intuition -- they haven't fully used deductive reasoning to come up with their own solution to the problem, it just "smells bad", and now they're coming up with rationalizations (weird that OP calls it strategic reasoning) why it's not a good way.