“Let
intuition be your guide with reason at your side.”
Those Aha! moments are increasingly being seen as a key business skill,
write Mandy de Waal and Marensia Lotter
Your business is
at an impasse, your most lucrative market is shrinking and your
competitor is a multinational able to spend way, way more on advertising
than your company ever could. Night after night you’ve been scenario
planning, number crunching and analysing ways to outsmart the
competition and reinvigorate your business. There are a number of
options which are risky, yet which may yield reward. What do you do?
You are about to hire a new managing director for your family-owned
business. You’ve done the background checks, personality profiles,
interviews and meetings and now you need to make a decision between two
top candidates. The outcome will affect your business dramatically. What
do you do?
The answer to both is actually to turn off your analytical mind for a
while. Stop thinking: meditate and day dream. Sound crazy? Well, the
world’s greatest scientific breakthroughs were made in a flash of
genius that occurred outside normal rational thought.
Einstein was daydreaming on a tram when he came up with the theory of
relativity; Descartes dreamed of an angel who explained the principles
of materialist rationalism to him; and Kekule discovered the cyclical
structure of benzene after falling asleep in front of a fire.
What’s common to all these innovations is the moment of “Aha!” A
sudden insight that rises from intuition and presents an illuminating,
penetrating new realisation that can result in a breakthrough.
While intuition is evident in science, it is even more apparent in
business. Ray Croc bought the first McDonald’s store when he could not
afford it but had a good hunch: “My funny-bone instinct kept urging me
on.” Conrad Hilton, who founded the Hilton chain of hotels, used
sudden insight to bid on the world’s largest hotel and ended winning
by a margin of only $200. “When I have a problem and have done all I
can – thinking, figuring, planning – I keep listening in a sort of
inside silence until something clicks and I feel a right answer,” said
Hilton.
Then there’s Sony. Sony founders Masoru Ibuka and Akio Morita turned
Sony into a globally recognised brand and one of the most profitable and
innovative companies in the world.
The creation of the name is a lesson in intuition. Scanning dictionaries
for a name, Ibuka and Morita found the “sonus” which is Latin for
sound, and combined it with the world “sonny,” which was a part of
colloquial vernacular in the US at the time, to make Sony. When asked
what the secret of his success was, Ibuka said he had a ritual.
Preceding a business decision, he would drink herbal tea. Before he
drank, he asked himself: “Should I make this deal or not?” If the
tea gave him indigestion, he would not make the deal. “I trust my gut,
and I know how it works,” he said. “My mind is not that smart, but
my body is.”
What is key to a “eureka” moment is a play between the seen and
unseen, of analytics and intuition. The analytical mind will rationalise
all the presented facts and information about a situation but intuition
applies inner wisdom and knowledge to present what is hidden or lies at
the core.
Intuition is a knowing that does not use an analytical or rational
process. It is an immediate cognition – a faculty of the mind that
taps into a holistic perspective which the analytical mind, that relies
on linear data, cannot access.
Intuition is often referred to as a “feeling” rather than a
conscious thought because it often does not make logical sense to the
rational mind, which remains operational in a cause-effect manner.
Intuition, rather, allows us to tap into circular information, which has
a sense of the whole.
To base business decisions only on the rational mind limits one’s
awareness to the immediate. It offers no insight into a time perspective
– how things may change and the long-term effects of a decision.
Slavish reliance on the tangible and analytical confines one to educated
guesses when you could be tapping into infinite possibilities which only
intuition can fathom.
This point is nicely argued by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline:
“People with high levels of personal mastery do not set out to
integrate reason and intuition. Rather, they achieve it naturally as a
by-product of their commitment to use all resources at their disposal.
They cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and
heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with
one eye.”
Like most things in life, there is no silver bullet for developing
intuition. Rather it is more a journey or lifestyle choice. Michael Ray,
who taught a legendary course on creativity in business as part of
Stanford’s MBA programme, found that the success or failure of
intuition in business largely rests with the motivation for bringing
intuition into business.
He relates five truths about intuition that he says business people
largely have trouble accepting but maintains that as people live these
truths, intuition will work remarkable results in their business and
personal lives. These are:
- Intuition is a
gift that everyone can develop. It is not the exclusive province of
the gifted or the oddball;
- Intuition
complements reason. In fact, the combination of experience,
information, reason and intuition is so powerful that psychologist
Arthur Reber of Brooklyn College maintains that “a blending of the
two modes … is still preferable to the use of only one or the
other;”
- Intuition is
unemotional. People often mistake their feelings for intuition.
Experiments show that when the individual is aware of his or her
emotional tendencies or preferences, he or she is less liable to
confuse these with intuition. For this reason, intuition works best
when one is calm and serene;
- Intuition
demands action. If you do not follow through, your decision or idea
dies; and
- Intuition is
mistake-free. Intuition is able to see options much more clearly
than our other facilities, and is able to make the best out of what
may seem to be a no-win situation.
The key to
accessing intuition is the belief that intuition exists within you. If
you are sceptic, simply suspend disbelief and see what happens. Then,
intuition could present itself in any of a number of forms unique to who
you are and how you access wisdom. The form could be feelings, symbols,
dreams, emotions or an innate awareness of the wholeness of things.
Intuition can be developed by quietening and disciplining the mind
through meditation, confirming intuitive experiences and taking action
on sudden insight. Business leaders often operate from a high level of
noise with hundreds of thoughts rippling the surface of the mind,
constantly. It is akin to throwing a handful of pebbles in a lake, with
many concentric circles rippling chaotically. A mind fine-tuned by
meditation is like a lake in which one pebble has been thrown and the
circles form a clearly delineated pattern that can be recognized for
what it is. Then, confirming your intuition strengthens it and
authenticates this invaluable decision-making ally.
Simply put, to develop your intuition into a powerful partner, believe
in it, exercise it regularly and act on it. The more you do, the more
you will gain confidence and trust its unerring ability. Or, as Dr Jonas
Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, astutely said: “Let intuition be
your guide, with reason at your side.”
Reprinted with Mandy de Waal’s kind permission. Mandy is a
communications consultant and founder of life-coach consultancy
SoulCircle – http://www.soulcircle.co.za. Marensia Lotter is a
clinical psychologist.
Business
Day Management Review, Business Day, January 2006