Inside Intuition

Eugene Sadler-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134121830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What isgut feeling and how can it be harnessed? To what extent should business decisions be informed byinstincts which may seem irrational or impossible to quantify? Inside Intuition examines how the latest developments in social psychology and cognitive psychology, as well as exciting new insights from evolutionary psychology and cognitive n

1 The view from inside

… The quick dreams,

The passion-wingèd Ministers of thought.

(Shelley, Adonais, 1821)

MAIN IDEA

Intuition is a phenomenon that recurs across languages, cultures, continents and history and throughout human endeavour from business to Buddhism. Intuition need not be ‘magical’ – it can be defined and explained scientifically. Understanding intuition contributes to more effective decision-making in professional and personal settings.

Everyone has intuition. It is one of the hallmarks of how human beings think and behave. It's impossible for us to function effectively without using ‘gut feeling’. Intuition presents itself uninvited to us rapidly, and in many different guises, and under the right circumstances its effects can be life-changing and life-saving. Here are some examples.

Detecting illness

A small child at home develops a moderate fever and a sore throat – nothing unusual in that – it's happened before. Except that this time for some inexplicable reason an image invades the parents mind's eye, and an ‘alarm bell’ sounds off inexplicably and involuntarily in her body. The symptoms are checked out, medical help is sought immediately; medics confirm that the parent's gut feeling was correct – the illness is far from trivial, it's scarlet fever. Luckily it was caught in its early stages and was treatable. Any delay and the outcome could have been much worse.¹

‘Sniffing-out’ opportunity

In the 1950s an ex-food mixer salesman had risked everything on a nationwide franchise for 228 fast food restaurants but he was collecting less than 2 per cent of the turnover but turning over more than a quarter of it to the owners. He offered to buy them out, but the price was high – $2.7million dollars – an enormous sum of money in 1960. His lawyer warned him not to take the deal. He later recalled: ‘I'm not a gambler and I didn't have that kind of money, but my funny bone instinct kept urging me on. So I closed my office door, cussed up and down, and threw things out the window. Then I called my lawyer back and said “Take it!” ’ Fifty years later the company has hundreds of thousands of employees, feeds millions of customers every day, has restaurant locations in over 120 countries and is an emblem of ‘globalization’.²

Split-second decision-making

One of the most famous sporting examples of intuition concerned the great Argentinean driver Juan Fangio in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix. On lap two instead of maintaining speed as he exited a tunnel for an upcoming straight section Fangio inexplicably braked. By doing so he avoided a serious accident that had occurred just around the next corner. But quite why he'd braked just didn't make sense. The key was Fangio's intuitive perception of the scene, which he only later figured out. Spectators in the stands, alerted by the deafening sound of the cars’ engines, usually had their faces turned towards them to see them roaring out of the tunnel exit. On this lap, however, they weren't looking at Fangio; they were looking up the track. Fangio's straight-ahead vision was focused on the road, but in his peripheral vision saw a subtle change in the colour of the stand area. Because the spectators had turned their heads away a normally light section in the field of view from their faces had become dark from the hair on the back of their heads. Fangio, concentrating on his driving, noticed this change and processed in split seconds without it having the chance to register. As a result he automatically braked, avoided the accident and went on to win the race.³

Choosing a mate

In a speed-dating experiment involving 156 undergraduates, researchers from Northwestern University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that in the space of a four-minute interaction daters exercised a highly-tuned ability that enabled them to sense whether a person ‘desperately’ desired a large proportion of the potential partners in the experiment or whether they were actually being more ‘picky’. Researcher Eli Finkel commented that if you're a speed dater it seems like you're ‘not only able to pick up something about the degree to which that person likes you, but you're able to pick up – in four minutes – the degree to which that person likes you more than their other dates. It's amazing.’ Speed daters who were intuitively perceived as being ‘unfussy’ didn't generate the ‘magical’ mutual attraction and tended to be given the ‘cold shoulder’ by potential partners.⁴

INTUITION IS EVERYWHERE

Homo sapiens – the wise ape – reasons and makes decisions analytically and rationally, but also takes decisions emotionally and intuitively. The word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin intueri which is often roughly translated as meaning ‘to look inside’ or ‘to contemplate’.⁵ In everyday English we frequently use terms like ‘hunch’ or ‘gut feeling’ to express intuition's bodily character, and not surprisingly we find equivalent phrases cropping up in other languages and across cultures. For example, in Chinese ‘direct feeling’ is zhí jué

in Hebrew ‘intuition’ is intuizia, and ‘gut feeling’ is tchushat beten; in Greek ‘intuition’ is diaisthisi (διαίσθηση), and ‘hunch’ is proesthima (προαίσθημα); in German to make a decision ‘out-of-the-stomach’ is Eine Entscheidung aus dem Bauch heraus fällen. Italians are more concise, and a single word suffices – intuito.⁶

But is intuition relevant in the world of business? It would seem to make sense that managers rely on intuitive judgement, and research certainly seems to back this up. When senior managers in US business were asked in a survey how often they used intuition in making decisions 12 per cent said ‘always’, 47 per cent said ‘often’, 30 per cent said ‘sometimes’ and the remaining small minority (one in ten) said they ‘seldom’ or ‘rarely’ used it.⁷ The circumstances under which managers used intuition ranged from sensing when a problem exists, performing well-learned complex behaviour patterns rapidly, synthesizing isolated bits of data into a coherent whole to checking on the results of their rational analyses, or by-passing in-depth analysis altogether.⁸ In a global survey of over one thousand managers the three most popular accounts of ‘what is intuition’ were: a perception of decision without recourse to logical or rational methods; an inexplicable comprehension that arrives as a feeling ‘from within’; and an integration of accumulated knowledge and previous experiences.⁹ Managers, it seems, are very ‘switched-on’ to intuition.

So, what is it that singles out intuitions? First, intuitions don't enter our conscious awareness as fully-formed answers; instead they appear as ‘judgements’. Second, they come laden with feeling (affect), so much so that we often detect intuitions through changes in bodily sensations. Third, gut feelings are fast – they arise spontaneously and involuntarily; moreover we can't will them to happen, but equally nor can we ‘block’ them out. And finally, perhaps the most perplexing thing about an intuition is that it's almost impossible at the time to articulate the non-conscious perceptions and thoughts that lie behind it. We feel that we ‘know’, but we don't know ‘how’ we know.

INTUITION IS PERPLEXING AND POWERFUL

Intuitions enable us to recognize, judge or predict people's intentions and situations with certitude, speed and often, but not always, accuracy. What goes on beneath the surface is an enigma to the thinker; almost as if there is ‘something else’ doing the thinking – all we are allowed is a glimpse and the feeling that we ‘know’, but we aren't made privy to how we know. If challenged to explain we may frustrate our questioner with responses such as: ‘Don't ask me why I just know it's wrong!’, or ‘I don't know why, but something tells me that …’. One of the perils of intuition is that these perceptions and compelling judgements can get mixed up with biases, fears and wishful thinking. Blindly following gut feelings is ill-advised; being intelligent about intuition requires being on-guard against subtle and invidious sources of error that can bias intuitive judgements.

From our standpoint in the early part of the twenty-first century intuition is a concept whose time has certainly come in terms of its popular appeal, for example, the best-selling book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell certainly de-mystified the concept in the public understanding.¹⁰ In parallel with Gladwell's efforts research is helping to illuminate not only its scientific basis, but the powerful influence intuition has in areas as diverse as entrepreneurship, innovation, business management, education and training, and health care.¹¹ In our working lives the sensations that accompany an intuition can warn us away from or compel us to follow a particular judgment or course of action, and the consequences of our intuitive choices can be significant for ourselves, our colleagues and the organizations and social institutions of which we are a part.

The experiences of artists, scientists, inventors and business people testify that when it is given the conditions to flourish, intuition is one of the cornerstones of human artistic, scientific, technical and commercial ingenuity. Intuition has been a potent force in human culture, civilization and organization for millennia. History is replete with examples ranging from the poets and philosophers of Classical antiquity to major scientific figures of the modern age and multi-millionaire business people who have recognized the importance of intuition in their works:

the soul is only able to view existence through the bars of a prison, and not in her own nature … philosophy received and gently counselled her, and wanted to release her, pointing out to her that the eye is full of deceit, and also the ear and other senses … and to trust only to herself and her own intuitions

(Plato, 428–347 BC, Phaedo 66)

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.

(Albert Einstein, 1879–1955)¹²

Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls[…]You have to rely on your gut, does the person seem real, does she openly admit mistakes […] You have to rely on reference checks, reports and most of important gut […] Your gut defies a technical rationale.¹³

(Jack Welch, Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, business ‘guru’ and author of Straight from the Gut)

INTUITION IS PART OF THE COGNITIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Intuition's power can be so convincing as to be mistaken for clairvoyance, extrasensory perception or some other paranormal phenomenon. At the transcendent and transpersonal end of the spectrum it has been suggested that intuition can connect us to the spiritual aspects of our beings and to a ‘supra-consciousness’.¹⁴ At a more mundane level our personal experience attests to the fact that without intuition it would be difficult to make everyday decisions and function effectively in a social world which, as the most gregarious of all the primates, we inhabit and are an active part of. Whether, as reasoning, rational beings we like it or not, the capability to intuit is integral to the condition of being Homo sapiens.

Figure 1.1 Albert Einstein, Nobel Laureate in Physics (1921) and ‘intuitive scientist’ without parallel. Copyright The Nobel Foundation (reproduced by permission).

Research in cognitive and social psychology reveal the origins of intuition to be within the non-conscious aspects of our thought, reason and judgment. The capability to intuit is an outcome of human evolution and occupies a ‘border state’ that stands on the threshold between our thoughts and our feelings, and between our conscious and non-conscious thinking. Modern brain-imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allied to emerging insights from neurology and cognitive neuroscience are beginning to identify specific brain regions that are implicated in intuitive judgement processes. We not only have ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Inside Intuition
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The view from inside
• 2 Analysis paralysis
• 3 Eureka! moments
• 4 Intuitive expertise
• 5 All in the mind?
• 6 The least effort principle
• 7 Intuitive ‘muscle power’
• 8 In two minds
• 9 A matter of feeling
• 10 The intuitive practitioner
• 11 Emotional, social and moral intuition
• 12 The intuitive ape
• Notes
• An intuition reading list
• Index