Awakening Intuition: The Practical Side of Developing Your Intuition

Intuition Quiz

1. Managers are rationale creatures who systematically formulate goals, assess outcomes and allocate probabilities between outcomes.
                                                            Yes _____  No _____

The answer is no. In fact, human beings have a surprisining difficult time using probably in assessing risk and outcomes. Despite statistics being being taught for many many years, few people use it as part of there daily lives.

2. Intuition is experienced by many people as which of the following?

            a. A vision or image
            b. An internal voice
            c. A feeling
            d. None of the above

The answer is a feeling or more specificially as a sensation. Very few people tend to hear a voice, partly explained throught the fact that you don't want to admit to hearig a voice. It's just not politically acceptable to say, "A voice told me the other day," versus my gut tells me. . ."

3. Intuition is an experience which cannot be learned, cannot be used to make management decisions.
                                                            Yes _____  No _____

Most people would say no. However, the real answer is that you can enhance an ability that you already have.

Intuition Definitions

Intuition has names such as:

• gut feel,
• common sense and
• horse sense.

While some people include extrasensory perception (ESP), in the sense we are using it means the incorporation of years of experience and learning into the unconscious.Intution incorporates years of making mistakes, what most of call experience. Women in general have a definate compettive advantage here.

Men have been brainwashed from a very early age to not pay attention to intuition; thus depriving themselves of one of your most powerful decsion making tools. However, one finds that those successful in business and governement have a highly developed sense of intuition.

Intuition: The Practical Side

In a study by Isenburg (1984) on how senior managers think, it is surprising to find that they do not fit the standard "rational" economic mode of though—they rarely systematically formulate goals, assess outcomes, or allocate probabilities between alternatives.  Instead, they rely on intuition to deal with novelty, uncertainty and inconsistency. 

1. Problem Detection

First, it deals with problem detection--sometimes not the easiest of tasks.  For example, declining product sales may not be a problem for one, two or even three months; even at the four month point it may not be clear what may be causing the decline, or even whether there is a problem.

2. Intuitive synergy

Intuitive synergy seems to be a real part of senior managers' lives.  They are able to take isolated bits of information and fit these into a pattern which completes the picture.  In the words of one manager (Isenburg, 1984), "Synergy is always nonrational because it takes you beyond the mere sum of the parts.  It is a nonrational, nonlogical thinking perspective."

     The ability to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
     Synthesize isolated bits of information into an entire picture.

3. Test Function

That is, the analysis supplied by the head must match the feeling provided by the heart.  The intuitive and the logical serve to balance each other determining the answer to a problem.  While Isenburg has dealt mainly with reasoning processes, knowledge content and its organization are also extremely important to expert reasoning.

4. To bypass in-depth analysis

Finally, intuition is used to incorporate years of experience into a mode of thought that minimizes current thinking.  A solution once requiring a great amount of time to solve is now intuitively--perhaps automatically--applied in similar contexts.

Developing Your Intuition

There are a number of different exercises on can do to awaken intuition. One is presented below. In this case, it's important to understand what it feels like. For many, intuition is not something you see, it is something you feel. The easiest way to do this is to think back when you made an intuitive decision or judgmental call that turned out right.

Reconstruct the sensations in the body at the moment you made the decision. Especially, determine where in the body the sensation came from and what it felt like. Many sensations are possible. For example: a tingling in the finger types, warm or cold sesation in the stomach, a loss of muscle tone and so on.

Do this for three different decisions that turned out well.
   

Readings On Intuition

Isenberg, Daniel (1984). How Senior Managers Think. Harvard Business Review, November

Bonabeau, Eric (2003). Don't Trust Your Gut. Harvard Business Review, May.

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