Intuition is not reasonable. It behaves like an animal: it sniffs the air, detects movement, spots patterns and leaps, often capturing its object with uncanny accuracy.
After intuition has a success, the entire process can be explained objectively — that is, from an exteriorized perspective — in a way that makes perfect sense to the rational mind. However, often such explanations have little to nothing to do with the actual process that won the success.
*
The average rationalist is unnerved by intuitive leaps. He’s fine with intuition in principle… but he does want more detail on how intuition accomplishes its goals: intuition’s methods for examining an environment, the criteria used for evaluating relevance and meaning of movements and patterns, and formulas used to calculate the trajectory of the leap…
An ambitious intuitive will confabulate plausible answers to all these questions. If he makes up fictional accounts that please the rationalists enough he can win respect and authority, and eventually accumulate enough power that he can simply do what he does without being interrogated and micromanaged into sterility (often by other creatives). Until he reaches that point he must credit all success to technique.
*
A strange variant of Peter’s principle: creatives are promoted to their level of managerial incompetence not on their leadership ability, nor on the strength of their ideas — but on the basis of their ability to falsify the creative process to fit the misconceptions of rationalists. It is by this process that corporations destroy their capacity to innovate — but on the plus-side also protect themselves against the significant discomfort of unlearning their institutional insularity, and being forced to contend with multiple human perspectives as such. It is far more comfortable to think merely objectively.
*
In its activities, intuition is not reasonable.
Does this mean that intuition and its outputs should be accepted as irrational and never be asked to account for what it does?
No — Intuition should account for itself, but primarily in the quality of its results. Intuitive ideas, once conceived should be thoroughly tested.
Does this mean that intuition cannot be assisted by method?
No — Intuition can be helped greatly by being provided optimal conditions for its free action.
The only room for method in the ideation processes is to create the most fertile, optimal conditions for intuitions, and these conditions vary greatly from person to person. Some need pristine uncritical freedom to play. Others need tension, challenge, argument, criticism. Some need solitude, others need audiences and yet others need the a precise chemistry of collaboration.
*
An intuition-friendly innovation method — and it is solely by intuition that creative and innovative ideas are conceived — will rely on research to help create the idea conditions for productive intuition. It will also be aware of how research can fail to help or even to dull intuition.
Research plays two roles:
- Research inspires intuition toward productive ideas. It frames a situation in such a way that intuition can leap further and more accurately than it could if it just were to brainstorm ideas in a vacuum.
- Research provides criteria by which the fitness of an intuited idea can be tested (first casually, then systematically).
Between these two kinds of research, intuition should be permitted to simply do what it does naturally.
*
In the end, though, once an idea is hatched, nurtured and matured, it must leave the nest and stand the test of reality.
If this test is lacking, some other criterion for success will assert itself, and this criterion is nearly always political power. The intuition of the most powerful person asserts itself as the judge — or rationalists will decide the matter according to what is most comfortable to the rational mind.
This is devastating to the creative process and to team culture.
Here is why: Intuitions rarely grasp one another’s insights directly. Reality is the medium by which intuitions come to agreement. Testing provides the ground by which multiple intuitions can lock into a real situation and make their individual contributions to collective understanding.
*
False accounts of intuitive processes are a lot like superstitious explanations of natural phenomena. The explanation satisfies the logical requirements of the naive intellect without actually coming close to conforming to the true dynamic.
In fact rationalism is the business world’s superstition.
*
In the medieval age, physicians bled and leeched their patients. The worsening condition of the patient caused by blood loss signaled to the medieval physician the the need for more bleeding and more leeching.
When things go downhill in business, businesses immediately respond with more process, more detailed planning, more safeguards, more accountability, increased scrutiny…