Over time, the mainstream conversation kicked out intuition. It was cast under the System One of decision making, one that was biased, and prone to making errors. The world moved towards the System Two of decision making based on a slower, more exerting logical process. The world of heuristics and gut feel was pushed out of the window. Who needs more errors? Why let emotions get in the way of decision making? Who needs the feelings? Logic and reason were here to save us.
Yet, the more we’ve gone through the logical process, the more companies tried to codify the innovation process, introduce things such as the Stage-Gate process, the less we’ve had disruptive innovations. And this is not to make a case against reason, against the need to subject ideas to the rigour of criticality, it’s to say we swung too far to the extreme that we forgot about intuition. The one thing that has been with us since creation. And just because we do not understand intuition doesn’t mean it doesn’t follow a logical process. It’s possible that intuition is following a more advanced logical process.
So today, we are here to argue that the there is a place for intuition in Innovation. The ‘I’ in innovation should be left to intuition. Intuition is the ability to retreat into the deep recess of the inner world, to feel just like the world feels, perceive just like the world perceives and out of that world, pick out the jewels that change the world. Logic wouldn’t have produced the car. For everyone would have thought of how to make the horse bigger, faster, stronger. Only intuition had the ability to produce that leap from horse to car. Same goes for the computer. It takes intuition, it takes the ability to intersect the two worlds of the humanities and science to arrive at great innovations.
Photo by Erick Butler on Unsplash