Intuitive Thinking is Future Thinking

Innovation
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein has studied 120 real cases of innovation, discovery, and invention ⁵. In his analysis he found that people had not necessarily been involved in a particular challenge, nor had conducted a deliberate analysis, nor had time for incubation. However, in all of Klein’s examples there was an unexpected “flash of illumination”, when a new idea or a solution would suddenly become evident. When everybody has the same information, it’s intuition that allows us to take a leap into the unknown.

Decision Making
Economics Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon stated that good management does “not have the luxury of choosing between ‘analytic’ and ‘intuitive’ approaches to problems”. Good management—indeed the ‘art’ of management—involves an ‘intimate combination’ of intuition and analysis ⁶. As SAS airlines CEO Jan Carlson put it ⁷ “In real life you find that even after you gather all the relevant information, there is still a gap, a part that you cannot neatly calculate. And that’s where you have to add your intuition, to make your final decision and go ahead.”

Creativity
Science has long proved that invention is born out of intuition. But, it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that of the two minds – the intuitive and the analytical – it’s the intuitive that is at the heart of creative thinking. As the great mathematician Henry Poincaré already pointed out in the last century: “It’s through intuition that we invent, and through reasoning that we prove.”

Forecasting and Strategic Foresight
Strategic foresight can be traced back to the RAND Corporation, a think tank that the US Air Force set up after World War II. At the time, nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. Because no one had ever fought a nuclear war before, no one knew how best to fight (or avoid) one. Strategic foresight was born out of the need to face a situation of uncertainty. Uncertainty is marked by novelty, which, by definition, lacks antecedents.

Economist Frank Knight famously argued that uncertainty is best understood when faced with risk ⁸. In situations of risk we can calculate the probability of a particular outcome, because we have been confronted with many similar situations before (think, for example, of insurance companies that calculate their premiums based on past data). But in situations of uncertainty we can only guess what might happen, because we lack experience to gauge the most likely outcome.  The key in those situations, Knight felt, was ‘judgment’, or ‘intuition’.

Creative problem solving
‘Creative Problem Solving’ can be defined as “the process to solve problems which presupposes the invention of an unprecedented solution when the method of attainment is not clear in advance”. In practice, this includes 90% of the problems we tackle daily in the workplace. As in all situations where one has to explore new ground and lacks previous experience, intuition plays a crucial  role.

System Thinking
Systemic problems entail composing the interests of many stakeholders into a shared solution. This thought process requires that our two minds work jointly: the analytical mind to gather data and the intuitive mind to boil them down to a solution. This is why Peter Senge, in “The Fifth Discipline”, argues that, “Systems thinking may hold the key to integrating reason and intuition” ⁹.

Strategy
Intuition is the salt of strategy. It’s about being able to feel the Zeitgeit (spirit of the times) and translating company know-how into actions that fit the spirit of the times. As Michael Porter, the father of strategy, says “Strategic Positionings are often non obvious, and finding them requires creativity and insight.” ¹⁰
Accordingly, six CEOs out of ten indicated that gut feelings are highly influential in guiding their business strategies (62%), while only 44% indicated that internal metrics and financial information (44%), or competitor analyses (41%) are highly influential (Business Wire, 2006).