Getting more intuitive has become a new business imperative. Too much knowledge, it turns out, can be an impediment to innovation. With renewed focus on innovation, intuition is gaining new respect as an organizational smart-skill.
Recently French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin put forward a new theory on how the great pyramid may have been constructed from the inside out, which credibly challenged both major existing theories. He developed his theory after following a flash of intuition that his father, also an engineer, had received.
The intractability of intuition has long been the reason that it’s use as a business tool has been undervalued. Linkages between intuitive insight and their outcomes have been ambiguous and hard to trace. Yet, evidence continues to accumulate where intuition has played an important role in the development of new products, discoveries, and inventions. Just as unpredictably, our over-reliance on information and knowledge has often failed to produce the results we expect them to.
As a result, we have begun to take intuition more seriously in the realm of the real. Intuition is economical. Generating results by encouraging greater intuition doesn’t require or bind a lot of capital or time. It frees our imagination and fits our sustainability models by enabling us to source from a wider set of variables than analysis. It generates outcomes far beyond it’s investment, often yielding results that disproportionately large by comparison.
Also it links to the things we find increasingly important these days - meaning, wisdom and creativity. Doesn’t it make sense then, that it is a skill well worth our attention and investment to better cultivate?
When clearly apprehended, intuition is vastly superior to all states of intellectual intelligence. It appertains knowledge from beyond space and time, reaches into the domain of unknown events and includes both the heart and mind in it’s intelligence. Unlimited, it serves as the ultimate renewable resource for imaginative potential.
Here are some of the questions we ought to be asking about how to improve and incorporate it in organizations:
How can our organization become more intuitive?
How can we develop intuitive capabilities in our talent-force and managers?
What kind of a culture do we need to have to support intuition?
Where are the best places in organizations to apply intuition?
Where can we start?
And if we want to, as learning and development professionals, champion the use of intuition as a sustainable business advantage, here are some of the answers.
1. Recognize Intuition as a Smart-Skill Which Can Be Developed.
Most employees and managers today have become accustomed to having an intuition deficit created by their environment. Becoming intuitive takes practice. Include developing intuition capabilities in your competency plans. Decide how and where you want your staff to be intuitive. Develop learning & training plans from there. Make sure you consult and dialogue with your people on this.
2. Shift from validating Intuition to developing Intuitive Capability.
Break away from the validation trap, where nothing happens except more theory. Save energy and get better results by going straight to building capability and learning through use. Create a climate where your organization’s stories and connections between intuition to results are recognized.
3. Build an Intuitive Language for your organizations to create/sustain a more Intuitive Culture.
Getting more intuitive means inviting “whole” people - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual who can contribute the most to your agenda. Whole people, both intuitively intelligent and intellectually intelligent, add value by increasing their creative contribution. Support them with a genuine commitment from your organization and management team that honors their contribution. If only logic and analysis are needed in your organization, a good computer model could theoretically replace people. But a computer program wouldn’t likely lead to more innovative performance.
Organizations who lead success find ways to help people fulfill their own dreams and inspire commitment through having a great vision and purpose within an open and honest communication style that fosters real cooperation.
4. Recognize the True Costs of Bad Business Ecology and the value of providing emotionally healthy workplaces and processes.
The following realities have a significant impact on innovation. Impaired people cannot innovate well. Prolonged misery exacts a toll from even the strong. Make an effort to eradicate stress and get rid of poor management practices and processes that create unnecessary stress for your employees. Turn up the joy factor; turn down the stress.
5. Practice Creative Surge. Focus on application with less analytical information and more intuition & imagination.
Technology, information, tasks and role demands on the job compete for attention. The more "noise" there is, the less clear and effective we become. We need to change the linear way we mentalize data - taking lots of information, then sorting, categorizing and sifting it until a few workable solutions emerge. Intuitive clarity is more like a tuning station that cuts through the noise and meaningless information. Intuitive solutions emerge in a non-linear way, sometimes through surprise and opportunity, and thrive in change. Self-aware people are more intuitive and tend to better listeners, change agents and relationship builders who are more anticipatory, proactive and open to new directions.
6. Recognize the heart as an instrument of superior intelligence and perception, the source of true intuition engagement.
Try this short experiment. Experience in your own senses the thought of "having an intuitive culture" vs. "working as you do today." Feel the difference in your heart. Which one gets you more inspired? Heart intelligence is superior to intellectual knowledge. We cannot afford the luxury of dismissing vital knowledge that lies outside traditional knowledge domains. Instead we must allow ourselves to be "guided by rightness", to cultivate emotional investment and personal meaning, and having good heart-sense.
7. Get specific with Innovation Capital. Start Innovation with Innovators, supported by Strategies, Innovation Competencies, Learning Curriculum and Development Plans.
Organizations don't innovate; people do. If you’re serious about Innovation, it has to start with individuals. Only when we start seeing people as innovators and developing their innovation capabilities does real innovation happen at a collective level.
The future is all about unleashing innovation and invention capacity. We dream first, then create. We need to learn how we truly move a concept from the unimaginable to the imaginable, to the conceivable, and finally the created.
So start by turning people into innovators, ideas into inventions and results. Build an Innovation Strategy supported by clear training and development plans with both curriculum and practice in innovation. But recognize that innovation training is part of a continuum and keeping moving forward. Intuition is one of the components but there are many more, like building imagination, learning the hidden science of creating, creative problem-solving, visualization, creative thinking tools, etc.
8. Shift from the Descendant View of having an "Inherited Vision” to an Ascendant View of the Future" where anything is possible "ex nihilum", out of nothing.
To attain new visions we must engage our imaginations. Currently we mostly perform “adaptive innovation” based on implementing incremental improvements. Thus we proceed on the basis of an "inherited vision" from the past, usually the industry benchmark. If we dream only adaptive dreams we encourage limitation and discourage invention. Pure innovation is something else entirely. It is a new dream; a fresh vision. Ultimately everything was made from nothing.
Where to start? It all starts with a Ting!, which is a made-up word for the sound of intuition striking a receptive mind. By saying yes to intuition we open up a lot of doors for greater success and creativity. By learning how intuition occurs for us we gain command of our abilities to recognize it as more than a fleeting experience. Then, once we understand what it’s telling us, we can move on to even greater Ting’s!
Intuition As a Sustainable Business Advantage - 8 Ways to Make it Work - To learn more about this author, visit Arupa Tesolin's Website.
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