Adam Smith writes, ‘This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence… It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of… human nature which has in view no such extensive utility’.
Granted the people involved in the development of the laser probably didn’t foresee its ‘extensive utility’. Einstein, however, was known for his strong belief in intuition, a mysterious and illusive aspect of ‘human wisdom’ that Smith makes no reference to.
DEFINING IDEA…
Often you have to rely on intuition.
~ BILL GATES, MICROSOFT BILLIONAIRE
The challenge with any theory that involves human beings is regardless of how logical it appears on paper, when it’s translated into life the wheels can fall off! The things that make us human also render us difficult to predict and systemise. In addition, there are mysterious aspects of human nature that we still don’t understand, intuition being one of them.
When Garry Kasparov, Russian World Chess Champion, started playing chess against the IBM computer they were evenly matched - both could predict four to five moves ahead. Deep Blue, however, was a computer and kept learning until eventually they played their final match in 1997, when Deep Blue could predict millions of potential moves in under a minute, making it theoretically far superior. The media went crazy when Deep Blue won 3½ to 2½. What’s extraordinary about that result, though, is not that the computer beat the World Champion, but that Kasparov won any games at all! And the only explanation is intuition.
The problem is that intuition isn’t an exact science and as such, business largely ignores it - at least officially. In a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 22 September 2005, ‘Leading By Omission’, Brazilian businessmen and corporate innovator Ricardo Semler told the audience about his experience of intuition in big business. Semler visited the head planner for a major oil company and discovered that while his personal log of intuitive forecasts was consistently more accurate than the complex, yet accepted mathematical and research based tools he never shared those findings with the board, even though they might have saved the oil company billions. The head planner recognised that telling the board of directors that he was basing his five-year forecasts on a hunch would be a career limiting move, adding, ‘I’ve been here thirty years and have earned the right to be wrong but I have to be precisely wrong to guarantee my survival.’
Financial legends and famous inventors often confess to the importance of intuition in their success, however this is usually in retrospect. Admitting to intuitive prowess is a luxury only the successful can afford. Society in general, and business in particular, does not yet officially accept intuition as the powerful human advantage it truly is.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU…
Science may not be able to explain intuition but most people won’t deny that it exists. There’s something very powerful about the instinctive gut feeling, whether it’s an initial response to a new acquaintance or a feeling about which course of action to take. Trust your intuition before anything else. Forget facts, figures and statistics, forget complex formulae and calculations; forget recommendations and testimonials: if you have a bad feeling about something, don’t do it!