Fingerspitzengefühl

Fingerspitzengefühl [ˈfɪŋɐˌʃpɪtsənɡəˌfyːl] is a German term, literally meaning "finger tips feeling" and meaning intuitive flair or instinct, which has been appropriated by the English language as a loanword. It describes a great situational awareness, and the ability to respond most appropriately and tactfully. It can also be applied to diplomats, bearers of bad news, or to describe a superior ability to respond to an escalated situation. According to Thomas Rongen, calling a soccer game and describing the brilliance of Christian Pulisic, the term is in common use to describe the instinctive play of certain players.

In social context, fingerspitzengefuhl suggests a combination of "tact, diplomacy and a certain amount of sensitivity to the feelings of others". It is a quality that can enable a person to "negotiate tricky social situations".

In military terminology, it is used for the stated ability of some military commanders, such as Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel, to describe "the instinctive and immediate response to battle situations", a quality needed to maintain, with great accuracy and attention to detail, an ever-changing operational and tactical situation by maintaining a mental map of the battlefield. The idiom is intended to evoke a military commander who is in such intimate communication with the battlefield that it is as though he has a fingertip on each critical point. In this sense the term is synonymous with the English expression of "keeping one's finger on the pulse", and was expressed in the 18th and 19th centuries as "having a feel for combat".

The term is only figurative, and cannot in itself give a realistic picture of the ability being described. It is cognitively related to personal possession of multiple intelligences, notably those pertinent to visual and spatial data processing. The term suggests that in addition to any discursive processing of information that the commander may be conducting (such as mentally considering a specific plan), the commander is automatically establishing cognitive relationships between disparate pieces of information as they arrive, and is able to immediately re-synthesise their mental model of the battlefield.

...
Wikipedia