Our western educational process generally discourages us from following in the footsteps of intuitive thinking. We are encouraged to follow the well worn path of reasoning but very rarely are we asked to intuitively think about things. Think for a moment about the things you know about yourself. Say for example, you are driving down the motorway and somebody cuts you off. What’s the first thing you would say? What kind of things do you find funny?

These kinds you just know about yourself are intuition. You don’t need to go to far to find the answers because these are things that you know. Ever gone to do something and you felt that you just shouldn’t do it? Or perhaps met an individual that you just didn’t like from the very first time you laid eyes on them? Why is that? I teach a lot of people at university who are very good at reasoning but not so good at intuition. It’s almost like we thing we have to switch off the role of intuition in our education process because it’s counter cultural. Today I want to make a case for encouraging the free flow of intuition.

When you know that you know

The Late Steve Irwin once said in an interview that he always had a deep passion for wildlife. You can tell he wasn’t lying when the man used to quite happily pick up a snake and not worry about it. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform literally weeks before he died. He put so much passion into his shows that it was really amazing to watch. He wasn’t pretending and he certainly wasn’t making it up in my opinion … it was 100% passion. How could he do that? I think because he just knew what he should be doing. He knew that he knew that he should be working with wildlife and with animals. You have instincts on the inside of you that are dying to get out. Can I tell you that you need to develop these instincts. That which you know about yourself will change as you learn more about it but the core ‘knowing‘ or intuition you have will never change. That which you know that you know about you is who you really are.

You never have to think about intuitive things

In a previous article I spoke about the art of conjecture. Often when we take guesses we are basing our decision making on our intuition. Harvard Academic Daniel Isenberg found that top managers often make most of their decisions when they talk out loud to themselves. Why is this? It’s because they are thinking through their decisions to see what feels right. Intuition is always there you never really have to think about it… but sometimes our subtle reasoning processes make us believe things we think are helpful but really are not. A conclusion after careful scrutiny is not intuitive thinking. We are using intuitive thinking when we are doing what our gut is telling is the right thing to do.

Intuition has built some great things

Go back and study some of the greatest entreprenuers. How many of them just knew that they would make it and this ‘faith’ drove them on to create impossible things. I am talking of people like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and so on. If you carefully look at how these people make their decisions there is as much reasoning as there is intuition. Some of the biggest decisions I have made have been through intuition. It’s not a flawless guide… but it’s a lot better than me just reasoning.

I would encourage you today to stop reasoning so much and begin looking towards your intuition. Knowing stuff is good because it develops us and makes us better. However, than can be no replacement for genuine ‘gut instinct’ in times of crisis, testing and extremity. Don’t rely of your mathematics or basic processes of mental reasoning only… remember your gut! Start today.

Technorati Tags: intuition, university, education process, instincts, knowing

“I say let it be known that I am acting in self-defense!” Sherlock Holmes

One the greatest literary caricatures of the last 100 years is Sherlock Holmes. The image of the pipe bearing detective with an eye for the most indiscriminate detail is burned firmly into the minds and hearts of thousands of people. What I am interested in today is to talk about the reasons why Sherlock Holmes and the majority of western thinking about problem solving is indeed wrong.

Not-so-elementary my dear Watson

Sherlock Holmes often cautioned Watson not to come to a conclusion about a crime until he had the ‘facts’. Watson was framed as the bumbling detective who never really put the pieces of the puzzle together. Holmes, the figure of the rational/logical detective espoused ad nausem in today’s crime shows, always reasoned through available facts, evidence and such things. Watson was always leaping to conclusions that were off the cuff, spontaneous and available. Putting the pieces together in a logical fashion as Holmes did actually is not all to dissimilar to Watson’s approach. Consider for a moment that we all making meaningful gestures at what we think problems are all the time. As we come to understand the situation we are faced with we immediately think of solutions. Chances are that we come to the conclusion that problems we faced have many ‘not-so-elementary’ elements that are not obvious. Conjecturing is one way we can actually tease out the not so obvious and begin to build better solutions.

Reasoning Versus Conjecturing?

These two practices are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact they are deeply connected. For a moment think of a problem you have. Tell me what’s the problem? I guess you have either spoken out loud and said ‘the problem is…’. Have you ever watched the news and a story caught your attention enough for you to whine about it? Say it was about the rental crisis. What’s the problem… well I guess you could say the problem is a lack of housing at a cheap enough price. Immediately you have just conjectured what the problem is and now we have available to us certain types of conclusions. Whenever you say… the problem is… you are conjecturing (either based on no or limited ‘evidence’). Getting more information may be important so we can reason but the ideas that underpin our reasoning processes are even more important.

Facts come after we beginning looking for evidence

People often say to me, ‘well this has been my experience.’ I then sit back and wonder why can’t people see that their experience (or the evidence in this case) happened and the facts they have collected are coming from a way of thinking about that experience. Facts are always available. When we conjecture as to what we think the problem is, we begin to look for support for our ideas. NOT the other way round. Human beings are wired up to believe things first then either confirm or deny later. To say that we come to conclusions through reasoning is true to a point BUT the vast majority of our decision making takes place on the back of ideas that have little or no confirmatory evidence. Sherlock Holmes was ridiculing Watson for doing precisely the same thing he was!

Reasoning comes from somewhere

Reasoning comes from a set of underlying ideas. If you think that there is a problem the chances are you may be the only one thinking that it’s so. Contrary to the majority of western thought… the ideas that form the problem take place in the human mind and may not even have support from other people. If you think people are saying nasty things about you… that’s a problem you have conjectured. You will then act on these assumptions, build a new way of defending yourself and even begin treating everyone as a possible threat. Holmes allow the ‘facts’ to speak him as he often said but these facts led to a reasoning process which in turn leads to Holmes conjecturing (taking an educated guess) as to what his problem is. Holmes ‘faith’ was created through the facts which led to certain conclusions as a result. We all do it! It’s not like we are immune to it. It’ s just this false consciousness we create whereby we think that we are being ’scientific’ but we are not. Things like faith and belief establish the conjecture or set of ideas and we follow through to a conclusion from there.

In concluding this post I would like to add that Sherlock Holmes was right to trust the evidence he found but if you read what he did he used an awful lot of guesswork, theorising, brainstorming and creative thinking. All of which require no so-called ‘evidence’ to lead to conclusions. They are merely ideas that suggest certain kinds of possibilities, concepts that suggest ways of thinking and educated guesses that stimulate the problem solving process. Take a look at your own life and begin to see the conjectures you have floating around in your head. What are you worried about? What makes you fearful? These are nothing more than ideas you have attached your emotions to which in turn creates a new reality for you to believe. Remember, it’ s not the ‘facts’ but where the facts come from that are important.

Technorati Tags: Sherlock Holmes., problems, reason, reasoning processes, guesswork, creative thinking., ideas, the problem solving process., conjectures