March 16, 2010
In a recent paper researching the actual act of intuiting within a number of oil industry CEOs (‘Lessons from “Good Minds”’) the researcher suggests that key to successful leverage of intuition by great leaders is the ‘programming’ of their unconscious intuitive mind through ongoing reflection on their experience - so that when they are asked to make a snap “gut” decision their sense organs
have the right intelligence, based on what is in some ways ‘essential’ about the situation, stored away. This is an ongoing process, a form of iterative ‘loop thinking’ or ‘spiralling’. We’d add that the ability of individuals to sense the big picture and the detail - macro trends in the economy and the market, as well as the vital micro level psychological realities and everyday situations of their customers and their team members - is a vital form of thinking ‘in parallel’ and is key to success in a socially-networked world where the voices of the small people, those at the edges, can become centre-stage in minutes. We call this ‘thinking digitally’, and it includes being able to cycle between the intuitive and rational ways of processing quickly and smoothly - to sense your deepest truths whilst positively analysing them with all the logic and sets of principles and success criteria you can muster.
