Beyond Thought
By Les Mottosky
We all have that voice inside of us.
Not that one, the other one.
There's an over-bearing voice that speaks-up on the things going on around us (and in us), sort of adding colour commentary to our daily living. Lots of times it's judgement. It can be helpful, but it can also lead to ineffective results.
Then there's that other voice. It's more shy. Quieter; so when it speaks it generally has something really important to say. We can miss, ignore or override it. And when we do, we often pay a price.
We use the labels for this voice interchangeably: referring to it as our intuition or gut feel. But as Professor Laura Huang has determined, there is a significant – but related – distinction.
In her book 'You Already Know - The Science of Mastering Your Intuition' Huang says intuition is a mode of processing nonsequential, sometimes random, information. It can be a short or long process whereby external data blends with our experience and/or knowledge and that provides the grounds to make a decision or form a judgment.
Gut feel, then, is the result of intuiting. It's an outcome. It can and will feel like a eureka moment of clarity independent of anything we've absorbed previously, but it's actually the end-result of this interaction of knowledge and experience with external data.
With AI clutching more of our mind-share – and the world – every day, it's likely our intuition will play a bigger and more critical role in our lives going forward. It will have to.
We can speculate that intuition was likely an often leaned-upon tool for hunter and gatherer societies of the past. This opinion comes informed by a relatively recent interaction with a tribe in the Amazon.
While developing his work on psychedelics, Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and explorer Wade Davis described asking South American indigenous women about ayahuasca's origins/recipe, and they replied "The plants told us."
(Ayahuasca – a psychedelic brew used in healing ceremonies – requires a leaf from one plant and a vine from another to produce its profoundly unique effects.)
Given recent papers debating plant sentience based on behaviours like signalling and memory, we can't discard the literal meaning of the indigenous perspective. (Not to mention our ignorance of the natural wisdom they've accumulated over the millennia). But a Western scientific interpretation of 'the plants told us' could be that the recipe was intuited by a tribal shaman or medicine person hundreds of years ago.
Regardless of its use in the past, intuition is a human tool as real and valuable as our other five senses.
By understanding the basic workings of our intuition, we can learn to build, use and trust it as a critical tool in our decision-making. It's a human application that AI will never be able to replicate and it provides each of us a distinct advantage as the tug-of-war between people-jobs and digital replacements continues to heat-up.
Is intuition our last competitive advantage?
What's your gut telling you?
TAGS: #Beyond Thought
Les Mottosky
Writes to expand the capacity of the human behind the career.
Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.
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