Intuition or planned thought

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I distinctly remember one rare time I had an an 'aha' moment when playing chess. I'm not a great chess player, I don't particularly like it, and when I do play it, I have to track and imagine the movement of each piece and imagine the different possible outcomes or possible moves that I can do. It's all very much me thinking it through. And this is how I do most of thinking when trying to figure out a problem or, as often happens, when choosing what to do in a game where I have most of the information. I need to very obviously plan.
But this one time playing chess with my sister, with only a few pieces left on each side, I had a very notable 'hit' of intuition about a series of moves that ended up in checkmate (like 4 or 5 moves or something) before I'd consciously thought through, well, any of it. And it was really freaky, this flash of intuition, and after I had it I had to go through the moves step by step just to double check, because it seemed preposterous that it could have been right.

Anyways, I'm just wondering how you play thought-intensive games, if you get flashes of inspiration or not. I guess this applies to non-game situations too.

audio restoration is sometimes like a game of chess, with a requirement to plan specific actions with the ramifications in mind several steps away. so after going down many dead ends one learns to carefully choose the action with the highest likelihood of success.