March 16, 2010
Intuition is still a taboo subject in business - even though great leaders often claim that it is key to great decision-making they do so only in their memoirs. For example, Ray Kroc’s decision to buy the McDonald’s logo and Akio Moriata (the inventor of the Sony Walkman) stating that ‘creativity requires something more than the processing of information. It requires human thought, spontaneous intuition and a lot of courage.” The reason for the persistent denigration of intuition is that it
(currently) doesn’t stand up too easily to the pressures from the arch-proponents of the deliberative, rational mode of consciousness who control so much of the institutional landscape - the accountants, economists and financial ‘analysts’ - no matter how many Nobel Prize-winning scientists state that intuition plays a key part in the very science that these economists are seeking to mimic. For business to move beyond this prejudiced thinking so detrimental to their survival they must first have the courage to bring into the open the actual role intuition plays behind the facade of number-crunching and data analysis - as well as work out ways to share, understand and evaluate what are by nature experiential and often non-verbal sensations, often through the use of stories, mood boards, visioning, metaphors and precedents.
