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Imagine navigating the complexities of today’s business world with a secret weapon that enhances your decision-making and leadership skills. This article explores the concept of intuitive intelligence and delves into eight common blocks that can hinder its development. By understanding and overcoming these barriers, business leaders can enhance their decision-making abilities, drive innovation, and navigate the complexities of the modern business world more effectively.
Understanding Intuitive Intelligence
Intuitive intelligence is the ability to make decisions based on insights that aren’t obvious through logical reasoning. It synthesizes experience, instinct and subconscious information. In their 1958 book Organizations, James March and Herbert Simon showed how decision-making models that depend on complete knowledge of parameters, like return on investment and probabilities of outcomes, are unrealistic. Rationality is bounded or limited, and economists who claim that firms optimize profit assume too much. Bounded rationality necessitates satisficing, or just-good-enough, solutions.
But from the standpoint of intuitive intelligence, optimizing profit may amount to very little. Breakthrough innovation—the leap from zero to one, as entrepreneur Peter Thiel puts it—creates returns that blow past improvements possible through optimization. In Thiel’s terminology, optimizing can take a firm from one to n, with n being the optimal iteration of a product or service. But the blowoff profits are made from monopolizing innovations, or taking them from “zero to one” by creating something new.
The recognition that rationality is bounded can expand, rather than limit, outcomes because innovations that result from intuitive intelligence in the face of ambiguity can create new industries and monopoly profits. The best business decision-makers develop their intuitive intelligence to broaden their perceptual scope, jettisoning biases like stereotyping, thinking in one language and selective perception.
Masters Of Intuitive Intelligence
Beyond Peter Thiel, there are many leaders and entrepreneurs who saw opportunities for innovation and ran with them. For example, Richard Branson’s decision to start Virgin Atlantic—despite having no experience in the airline industry—was driven by the belief that he could offer better service than existing airlines.
Spanx’s founder Sara Blakely was getting ready for a party when she decided to cut the feet off some pantyhose and wear them under a pair of white pants to ensure her outfit had clean lines. Her intuitive thinking and firm understanding of her target market’s needs were key to her company’s success.
Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, relied on his intuition to transform a dry-coffee store into a global coffeehouse chain by recreating the Italian coffeehouse experience in the United States. Starbucks, which was named after a character from Melville’s Moby Dick, was able to grow because Schultz intuited that customers would value a place to relax and socialize over a cup of coffee.
8 Common Blocks To Intuitive Intelligence
At the Business Intuition Institute, we’ve identified eight blocks to intuitive intelligence.
1. Lack Of Self-Awareness: Understanding your own thought processes and emotional responses is crucial. Intuitive intelligence requires reflection and pattern recognition.
2. Lack Of Experience And Knowledge: The more varied your experiences, the richer your pool of subconscious knowledge. By engaging in activities outside your usual scope, you can broaden your perspective and enhance your intuitive abilities.
3. Bias Against Business Intuition: Many professionals believe that only left-brained thinking, which is associated with logic, can result in profitable solutions. However, some of the greatest, revenue-generating innovations can come from right-brained, or creative and qualitative, thinking.
4. Thinking In One Language: A major barrier to intuitive intelligence is being locked into the process of deductive reasoning. Many of us think only in words or numbers. But intuitive insights arrive when we tap into the flow of our subconscious.
5. Selective Perception: Because of habits or unconscious blockages, we often instinctively restrict the kind of information we receive. To build up our intuition, we must overcome things like perceptual distortion and biases, artificial constraints or thinking inside the box.
6. Failing To See The Forest For The Trees: It’s common for decision-makers to get lost in detail and suffer from analysis paralysis. Being so caught up in the granular can keep people from big-picture, intuitive insights.
7. Conformity To Organizational Norms: When organizations have cultures that are overly uniform, they tend to block creativity and intuition.
8. Gresham’s Law: When ways of operating and thinking become the default process, the possibility of breakthrough intuitive thinking is hindered. Sir Thomas Greshman said that “bad money drives out good,” meaning that overuse of poor currency (or thinking, in this case) keeps people from making better currency. This phenomenon causes us to rely on second-rate forms of problem-solving because they’re familiar, which drives away creative, breakthrough solutions.
Business leaders who can overcome these barriers to intuitive intelligence will help open the doors for breakthrough innovation.
Conclusion
To harness the power of intuitive intelligence, we need to tap into our inner wisdom. Used alongside analytical thinking, this skill can help us generate innovative, original solutions that transform our businesses and create a bold future.
Read the original article here: Intuitive Intelligence And 8 Common Blocks That Impact It (forbes.com)
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