Intuition Is the Highest Form of Intelligence
This is an expanded version of an article I first published on Forbes in 2017.
Intuition, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is less about suddenly "knowing" the right answer and more about instinctively understanding what information is unimportant and can thus be discarded.
Gigerenzer, author of the book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, says that he is both intuitive and rational. "In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part. Now, in private life, I rely on instinct. For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she."
I'm telling you this because recently one of my readers, Joy Boleda, posed a question that stopped me in my tracks:
What about intuition? It has never been titled as a form of intelligence, but would you think that someone who has great intuition in things, has more intelligence?
My "gut instinct" is to say yes, especially when we are talking about people who are already intellectually curious, rigorous in their pursuit of knowledge, and willing to challenge their own assumptions.
Let me put this a bit simpler. If all you do is sit in a chair and trust your intuition, you are not exercising much intelligence. But if you take a deep dive into a subject and study numerous possibilities, you are exercising intelligence when your gut instinct tells you what is - and isn't - important.
In some respects, intuition could be thought of as a clear understanding of collective intelligence. For example, most web sites are today organized in an intuitive way, which means they are easy for most people to understand and navigate. This approach evolved after many years of chaos online, as a common wisdom emerged over what information was superfluous and what was essential (i.e. About Us = essential).
Theo Humphries argues that intuitive design can be described as "understandable without the use of instructions". This is true when an object makes sense to most people because they share a common understanding of the way things work.
You might say that I'm a believer in the power of disciplined intuition. Do your legwork, use your brain, share logical arguments, and I'll trust and respect your intuitive powers. But if you merely sit in your hammock and ask me to trust your intuition, I'll quickly be out the door without saying goodbye.
I say this from personal experience; the more research I do, the better my intuition works.
Although this may be a paraphrase of his thoughts on the subject, Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
Sometimes, a corporate mandate or group-think or your desire to produce a certain outcome can cause your rational mind to go in the wrong direction. At times like these, it is intuition that holds the power to save you. That "bad feeling" gnawing away at you is your intuition telling you that no matter how badly you might wish to talk yourself into this direction, it is the wrong way to go.
Smart people listen to those feelings. And the smartest people among us - the ones who make great intellectual leaps forward - cannot do this without harnessing the power of intuition.
Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of numerous bestselling books, recently observed that, “Writers and physicists report that 20% of their most important ideas happen during mind wandering—and those ideas are more likely to be ‘aha’ moments.”
He then suggests, “Time set aside to daydream is an essential part of a creative day.”
Is this how your company works? Does it carve out time for people to be creative and to explore?
In many cases, the answer is no. That may be why large companies often hit a wall and stop innovating, or growing. Small companies hit this wall, too, whenever a leadership team gets too rigid or regimented.
There are limits to what discipline and data can produce. Our increasingly “data-driven” world has severe limitations.
Writing a few years ago in The New York Times, Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis pointed out that "A big data analysis might reveal... that from 2006 to 2011 the United States murder rate was well correlated with the market share of Internet Explorer: Both went down sharply. But it’s hard to imagine there is any causal relationship between the two."
In other words, big data does some things very well, but it is a long way from a magic solution to, well, anything. And yet we are increasingly surrounded by leaders and organizations that want to make every decision based on data.
But there's another problem, and it's a significant one: big data can be just as biased as your stubborn old uncle who thinks everyone who disagrees with him is an idiot.
According to the Irish Times, "researchers at Eurecat — the Catalonian Centre for Technology — in Spain and the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Italy, agreed that 'algorithmic bias exists even when there is no discrimination intention in the developer of the algorithm'."
This does not mean that the programmers were biased; it could also be that the data sources contained certain forms of bias.
The antidote to such flaws and weaknesses is not more data. Instead, we need to raise the amount of respect given to the very human skill of intuition. Mind you, I'm not talking about blind hunches or a "feeling" that comes over you one Sunday night while you watch House of Cards.
In the context of professional organizations, intuition literally means arriving with confidence at an answer without being able to explain how you got to that answer. In the big data era, being unable to explain your logic is a huge liability, and yet this is exactly what happens with expert intuition.
In the years ahead, artificial intelligence and automation are going to kill millions of jobs, maybe even your job. You're not going to be able to protect your job simply by acting more like a computer… because every computer will be able to out-computer you.
Instead, you need to foster uniquely human skills, such as intuition. The same is true for your organization. Human qualities will become more important in the years ahead, not less.
I'm a realist. Many leaders and professionals will read this article and scoff at my conclusions. They'll argue that gut instinct is the realm of biased, lazy workers. They'll say that facts and logic rule today, nothing else.
Time will tell. I'd still bet on the judgment of true experts — actual human beings — who know how to study the data, apply rational thoughts, but ultimately also trust their intuition.
In far too many cases, the facts tell you to do one thing, but your intuition screams the opposite. When that happens to me, I never ignore those screams.
Intuition, Love, Intention and Attention
ILIA is my term for the state in which you create resonance between your intuition, love, intention and attention. By resonance, I mean that the positive effects reverberate back and forth between these elements, magnifying their positive impact on you and on the people you touch.
Let’s take them one by one:
INTUITION: I use this word in a broader manner than most. To me, intuition is not a mere decision-making tool, although it certainly can help you make the right call. It is also a way to know things you have no explicable way to know, to tap into eureka moments that help you leapfrog the current ways of doing things, and to access wisdom beyond that stored in your body. For reasons I don’t fully understand, we like to deny the fact that the most powerful forms of intuition are far more than just gut feel.
LOVE: When I say love, I mean unconditional love as defined by Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who says, “Unconditional love is the heartfelt benevolent desire that everyone and everything — ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe — reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, with no strings attached, with no expectation of return, and it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves.”
Julia says that we don’t create unconditional love; we access it by finding ways to notice it working inside you. Such ways include prayer, pets and babies, positive intention and meditation. “Think of it as a force like electricity,” she says. “We are in charge of whether we access it, and that is all.”
INTENTION plus ATTENTION: “You can do anything you set your mind to do" goes the saying.
Unfortunately, many people only internalize the first half of this statement. "You can do anything..."
This implies that if you want to get promoted in six months, you can get promoted in six months.
But success is dependent on the second part of the statement: “...you set your mind to do." In other words, you must pay attention to your intention.
Your intention describes what you want so much that you keep it active in your mind and heart. In some respects, it is a “memory” of the future.
But... your attention determines whether your intention comes true.
Intuition and unconditional love help you set intentions that will most greatly benefit you and others. Plus, the greater your ability to know the right path, the more likely you will be able to maintain your attention to your intention.
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Here’s my definition of ILIA:
A way of being in which an individual consistently accesses unconditional love and creates resonance with it plus their intuition, intention and attention.
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By resonance, I mean that these different elements align. Your attention follows your intention. Your intention was formed as the result of a deep and meaningful intuitive insight. And unconditional love permeates all of these, creating a situation in which you also are aligned with the people and world around you.
In such a state, you/we bend the boundaries of what it means to be human. Since intuition and unconditional love both dwell in places external to our physical body, you/we are fully leveraging the fact that everyone and everything is interconnected. We replace our typical “go it alone” misguided perception that we are separate and replace it with the power of unity.
Is Intuition A Clue?
Now, let’s focus on a profound form of intuition, when you somehow gain knowledge or insight without any logical explanation for how you acquired that knowledge.
This is where many professionals get uncomfortable. If you can't prove it, you can't trust it, they say.
But according to the Pew Research Center, nine-in-10 American adults say they believe in God or a universal spirit. Sixty-three percent says that their belief is absolutely certain.
They say this despite the fact that science has yet to prove the existence of God.
In another Pew study, 59% of American adults said that science and religion are often in conflict, but only 30% think their religious beliefs conflict with science.
I cite these statistics only to point out that we can't validate everything we believe, and we can't fully explain how the world works.
In many respects, the purest forms of intuition closely resemble faith. We've all heard stories about someone who suddenly knew that a loved one had died unexpectedly, despite the complete lack of any facts or communication to back up that intuitive feeling. And we all know the spooky feeling of hearing that, yes, in fact, their loved one had died at that exact moment.
Those of us who believe in God do not abandon our faith when we go to work, but somehow many of us abandon our willingness to accept that things happen even though science cannot explain them.
Am I suggesting that leaders start to run companies based entirely on intuition? No way.
But here's what might make sense.
What if you looked at intuition as an important clue?
To continue my previous example, the person who sits bolt upright in bed fearful for her relative… will most likely then try to contact her loved one. In the process, she will (sadly) discover the tragedy she feared actually happened.
It would be irrational for this person to simply ignore the feeling and turn on her television.
In the same manner, when you get an intuitive jolt, it is irrational to ignore it. Dig deeper, do some research and see if it leads somewhere that holds up to intellectual analysis. But don't let intellectual analysis prevent you from receiving the message in the first place.
When I was a child, it was considered impossible to sit on top of a mountain, far from any wires or building and communicate instantly with someone 7,000 miles away. But yesterday I did just that using my iPhone.
Ninety-nine percent of the people reading this article probably can't explain how the photo I took of a 10,000-foot peak made it in less than one second from my phone to my friend's phone in Asia. But you still believe in smartphones, right?
If science told you that intuition works just like a smartphone and that you can buy iNtuition at any Apple Store, you'd race to join a line that goes around the block (probably twice).
Don't abandon science, reason, facts, evidence or logic. But also don't expect science to explain everything just yet. Intuition, like faith, may be one of those things that work better than science can yet explain... especially if you open yourself to the possibilities.
Half of What You Believe about Intuition Is Wrong
The basic idea: When most professionals talk about intuition, they are speaking about intuitive judgment: how we make decisions.
There is a second type of intuition, however, that many people entirely ignore: intuitive insight.
In a fascinating paper by Viktor Dorfler and Fran Ackermann, the authors argue that...
Based on recent research involving in-depth interviews with Nobel Laureates and creative people of similar standing, we are inclined to believe that no significant creative result has been achieved in any other way than by means of intuition.
Taking this belief one step further, the authors make the case that, "There is intuition which is not judgement, which actually produces the (new knowledge). This is what we call intuitive insight.
A bit more background: "Everywhere I went (in the creative process)," recalls Paul Simon about his efforts to write the now-classic song, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, "Led me to where I didn't want to be. I was stuck."
Simon just had a fragment of the song. In retrospect, he realizes he must have eventually been subconsciously influenced by gospel music he liked from the group, the Swan Silvertones. He started playing around with gospel-style chord progressions and broke his creative logjam. To be clear, Simon didn't devise a plan to do this; he just did it. Only later did he figure out what must have happened.
If you want to be truly original, creative or innovative... you'll need to harness intuitive insight. This does not mean to use intuition in decisions you make during a creative process. It means being open to eureka moments in which you make intuitive leaps. It also means recognizing that too great a reliance on logic and conscious thought will never result in truly innovative leaps forward.
Just because you can't explain the source of your insight doesn't mean your insight is flawed. The whole point of intuitive insight is that it involves leaping to a new level without fully understanding everything that made that leap possible.