The Ecology of Intuition

From Crisis to Opportunity

In the midst of a global restructuring that’s causing massive change in economies, trade, jobs and lifestyles, what impact can intuition have on the inevitable rebalancing of both our economic and societal values? What is the influence of intuition on our world? What would happen if we looked more deeply at the importance of intuition and it’s causal linkages? If we increased the value of intuition how would that change the world? Would a greater concentration on developing intuition capabilities, and consequently a new neural footprint, improve our future? What new questions are worthy of exploration and dialogue?

To emerge from a world in crisis, intuition may play a crucial role. The ecology of intuition is a topic that, in the light of our formidable crises and challenges, can help us strip down and re-think what it means to be human in a modern world.

The world, as we have grown it, has become ideally suited to “human-havings” and “human-doings,” mostly in tandem, since one necessitates the other. It seems less well adapted to foster “human-beings.” With the quest for material gains outpacing and displacing other human needs, we need wiser minds to lead the next quadrant of our human unfolding.

The impact of intuition affects many areas. Its underlying connections, when understood in full context, affect the greater proportion of our lives and institutions.

The value of intuition exerts a direct and potentially measurable impact on learning, business, science, health, environment, human relations and conflict resolution. Each of these also influence and impact individuals, economies and societies. When the value of intuition changes, even minimally, at a personal level, it acts as a lever for larger systemic change.

This purpose of this paper is to scope out and frame the beginning of a discussion on intuition and its connected topics. My hope is that others will contribute to these ideas and help develop them.

Other preliminary questions include: What is the role of intuition in shaping our lives and on society? Why is intuition important?

In answering these questions, we must also ask how increasing the importance of intuition can shape individual, community, business, environmental and societal values? And what can people and organizations do individually and collectively to effectively develop intuition? Then, if we can accomplish this, how would we and society benefit?

The textbook definition of intuition is knowing without thinking. However this says nothing about the significance of what intuition is. Intuition as a science is difficult to study as it is a highly subjective individual experience, a phenomenology. The wisdom it brings is more important than its sensory diversity. While investigating sensory intuitive experience might waste time, developing increased intuitive awareness could yield great benefits.

Ancient Vedic texts say that intuitive intelligence precedes the senses. Intuitive thought is regarded as pure thought, while thoughts processed and interpreted via the senses are regarded as impure thought, muddied. In our modern world our education has accustomed us to regarding our sensory experience as primary, rather than defaulting to our intuitive intelligence.

We source intuition when our intellectual and information defaults don’t work. When facts aren’t enough, intuition becomes a creative resource to extend our knowledge.

The value of intuition rises most during changing times. In the absence of precedents, creative solutions are needed to understand and solve complex issues and problems. The current period of rapid discontinuous change provides fertile ground for increasing our use of intuition.

Intuition, Self and Human Engineering

In its purest form, intuition is universal knowledge, which supplants our intellectual processes. Most of us are under-skilled in intuitive know-how. Western education processes, dominant in global education, typically displace this knowledge by favoring and reinforcing analytical and comparative reasoning.

Religious institutions reveal enough knowledge to keep the faithfulness of their community intact. Traditional indigenous communities hold their knowledge sacred within their own cultural compacts. And they have had to fight for the right to retain their knowledge, their language, and their culture which includes reverence and the practice of intuition, often against other forms of religion and philosophical thought that threatened their existence. Both of the above areas lean to cultivating intuition within a limited view of the modern world. As we inhabit an increasingly secular and urban planet, our world has become much more complex.

By contrast, method-based schools of yoga and meditative practice have been more successful at developing intuition for their communities of practice. However, these often diverge into polarized member interests and visions which fail in connecting to outcomes in a broader multi-scaped modern world.

Intuition has both proponents and detractors. Typically, only a small proportion of people in any population experience heightened intuitive sensitivity. Because of this, the personal experience of intuition has been regarded as an exceptional skill for certain people, psychics, mystics, saints and gurus, whose seemingly superconscious abilities are seen as anomalies. Discussions of intuition in this area tend to centre around crediting or discrediting individual intuitive experience rather than developing it more expansively in more people.

While extreme abilities have been attributed to gurus and mystics, both often developed and taught specialized techniques to their followers, who in turn experienced expanded spiritual and intuitive awareness. In these circles development of intuition became self-evident at an individual level. Beyond this, a circle of believers or nonbelievers, depending on which camp they were in, would consort. Comparably, believers who followed their development practice experienced direct results, while non-believers looked for a plausible explanation according to their own beliefs or sought reasons to discredit or disprove the experience of others. This polarization of believers and non-believers hindered the development of building common understanding and collective intuition development.

Western education approaches, continue to favor developing the intellect, comparative analysis and critical thinking skills. Consequently intuition is still vastly under-rated and underused as a skill.

While intelligent comparative analysis is important, computers are now often better at processing volumes of data than humans. Achieving this productivity milestone raises the question, “What is the true purpose of the human mind?”

Intuitively, this question suggests that humans were designed to create and to conceive beyond the intellectual mind. Scientists have charted so far only a small portion of our capabilities. Therefore, a vast proportion of human abilities still exist beyond science. Anecdotally, we realize that the results created by developing and experimenting with intuitive and creative abilities will likely out-pace the speed at which science will be able to explain, prove and quantify them.

Intuition’s value rises the most during changing times or when precedents are absent and when creative solutions are required to understand and solve complex issues and problems.

By increasing the importance and scope of intuition in consciousness science. currently the least researched sub-topic in this field, more research funding can be directed to studying intuition mechanics and development so that we can better understand and evaluate its impact on our perceptions, decisions and ultimately the fulfillment of our lives.

To be more purposeful and fruitful, research needs to shift away from validating personal intuition experience, made scientifically difficult by the need to quantify first person experience, toward identifying linkages and applications.

Some consciousness researchers are still searching for the neural correlates of consciousness, the physical location where the wires and substance of consciousness map onto the human body in the brain. With intuition they may see that the roots of science contain a self-limiting subjectivity. So it’s more like a two-dimensional rabbit hole rather than fourth dimensional world it is trying to define. Scientists themselves are the subjective arbiters of their own world. As they change, their world emerges more fully into the real.

The question of consciousness is perhaps the most significant problem still unsolved by science. It is no wonder that the problem of consciousness has been regarded as perhaps the most significant question that remains unsolved by science. Consciousness is literally a matter of life and death; you exist only insofar as your subjective reality exists. (Revonsuo, 2009, Prologue p.16)

More research funding should be committed to studying the role and relationship of intuition and sense perception with a view to understanding how the mechanics of intuition work and its intricate relationship with our nerves, senses, chemistry and how their improvement can make a difference in our lives. We need to study different ways to develop intuition and what impact they have on perception, learning, happiness, decision-making, stress, creativity and innovation.

At a personal level, most people can identify with the experience of receiving intuition about an important pending situation and choosing to ignore it, often to their own detriment.

The reasons they ignore their intuition vary by individual and by situation. These range from a lack of experience or confidence in trusting their intuition and personal preferences, sensory processing habits and resistance to change.

Even wishful thinking can have the effect of suppressing intuition. This is what happens when a person keeps on hoping for a different outcome, rather than choosing to respond to the intuitive information he or she has received.

Learning more about the psychology of intuition response would help us understand why we sometimes opt to ignore intuition’s important signals. This learning could open greater understanding about the conscious functionality of our being.

The potential benefits of greater personal intuition skills cannot be underestimated. The quality of our intuitive experience influences every decision we take in our lives — from choosing a potential mate to experiencing, creating and communicating in every relationship, our physical and mental well-being, investments, job, career and business choices, artistic pursuits, hobbies, our ability to accurately assess opportunities, maintain connections, govern our personal perceptions, manage our time, manage stress, our authenticity, clarity, happiness and our sense of spiritual union or connection with the universe.

By communicating the benefits of improved personal intuition and increasing the availability and accessibility of related training and information, humanity stands to advance considerably, both personally and collectively. The other question to consider is, what happens if we don’t?

Defining an optimal level of intuition function would influence the desirability of attaining it. This might go something like this: A high-functioning intuitive person is someone who has attained a defined level of intuition self-mastery, with a balance in both intuition and reasoned intelligence, who both wisely directs and is directed by a keen sense of intuitive knowledge and purpose, whose self-interest and compassionate public interest is generally unified, and who remains aware of the opinions and developing conditions around them (i.e. can read the room).

From there we can identify levels of intuition functionality that are on a lesser scale of functioning and define other levels that may signify a level of intuitive impairment.

Intuition, in its purest form, is the basic knowledge of the universe, which supplants our intellectual processes. Most of us remain patently under-skilled in intuitive know-how.

Intuition and Learning

It takes surprisingly little effort to train ourselves to be more intuitive. Likely this is far less than what was needed to educate ourselves to become functionally analytical. The basics of training typically amount to some combination of self-reflective practice, meditation techniques, and application.

The connection between intuition and learning are fascinating and generate interesting questions about how the two properties interact and enable each other. How does a higher intuition level promote faster or more effective learning? More research aligned with intuition and skills or talent development, intuitive and neural development, how intuition may assist in overcoming developmental and learning disabilities, and fostering more intuitive approaches to learning pedagogy could help answer these questions.

In future, we may all learn new skills by electronically or bio-synthetically by applying an advanced neural intuitive program to help create the synaptic pre-conditions that enable us to learn and master that skill faster. An increased value and role of intuition can potentially be very effective in the video-game and learning industry, and the fusion of learning, gaming, experiential, motor and cognitive skills development.

Personal intuitive development in the general public has exceeded academic research and study in intuition. The anecdotal impact and development advice provided by countless self-help books that feed and guide personal development trends and experiential learning, have contributed a lot more to developing intuition abilities than intuition studies have. Experiencing and doing create better results than studies. Widespread digital access to quality learning material has accelerated this trend.

There is good reason to bring intuition practice into the junior education system to prepare young people to manage their own internal resources. This way, they can benefit from having reduced stress, while achieving superior problem-solving capabilities and higher personal fulfillment. In India, yoga is taught as part of a general school curriculum to help calm and balance the mind. Other cultures would be wise to learn from this.

Intuition is used to distinguish and distill the essence of good information from muddied over-information – i.e., discern the signal from the noise. Access to so much information has become a perpetual distraction.

Instinctively, we recognize there is enormous power in a connected world. We can now distribute learning and awareness instantaneously. We have created the capability to immediately raise consciousness and know-how on any matter simultaneously. We have become one mind.

Intuition and Business

In Feb. 2009, the Canadian Society of Management Accountants published an article I wrote on “Intuition as a Sustainable Business Advantage.”

In May 2009, the Ontario branch created a new Leadership award that recognizes the outstanding efforts of their members in intuition, attributed to generating successful ideas and solutions from a divergent thinking perspective — a.k.a. “thinking outside the box.” This category is alongside others for imagination, innovation and big ideas.

Most CMA members occupy the trusted status of a chief financial officer, executive manager or comptroller for public, institutional, government and private businesses. These are the people who manage the balance sheets, eliminate waste, evaluate assets, help determine strategic business plans and provide management advice to keep their corporations profitable. The existence of this award makes a profound statement to both members and Canadian executives and corporate executives around the world — that good intuition is connected with profit, innovation and leadership. Here is an association that is leading the way and thinking about tomorrow.

I was invited by one of the local chapters to attend Devamrita Swami’s April 2009 lecture on “Spiritual Accounting”. In it, the Yale-trained economist and monk spoke about the important role that accountants have in influencing what societies value. He said that accountants exert an important influence because they ascribe how things are valued and what matters.

Accordingly, these assessments determine what society values by affecting both how markets respond and how people live their lives. A direct example of how accountants affect societal values includes assessing the global impact of climate change and determining the size and costs of our “carbon footprint.” Only when cost accountants began to derive monetary values for the size of this footprint through new directions in accounting theory and practice, did the movers and shakers of the world begin to really pay attention and make new decisions. The bottom line is that when accountants pay attention, everything changes.

Contrast this with the state of the global automotive industry in 2009 — which was fanning the flames of its own demise in the industry’s arrogant inability to persistently drive innovation value and respond to a changing consumer market.

I led the Innovation Panel for the World Automotive News Congress that year – the site conference for the global automotive industry held in Detroit back then, which was the birthplace of the world’s mass production vehicle manufacturing plants. This was close to the birthplace of the visionary engineer Henry Ford who in the 1900’s started making the dream of every worker being able to own a car a reality.

While I was there, I saw an industry in the throes of its own desperation. The casualties of this industry persist amid many influence factors, which include the political predilections of the oil industry, that helped influence this painful outcome.

They could not “think outside the box” in popular terms. But what is this box and where did it come from? What does it mean to see outside it? This is industry-speak for intuition and creativity that leads to novel innovation.

But the human mind looks nothing like a box. So, what was the origin of the box? The box metaphor began as a mental model when the world changed to an industrialized society. As industries began to devise ways to customize mass production of material goods and communicate how this was done, the box became the common visual model to illustrate how materials were broken down, processed and distributed. Gradually this model became incorporated by habit into our thinking process and was extended into information management.

With its obvious limitations as far as complex systems and human beings are concerned, the box has become too constrained as a model to contain our growing comprehension of implicit knowledge, our beingness, and the complexity of the world around us. This model represents the epitome of linear reductionism, on which traditional science is based, which attempts to break everything down into its smallest components to understand how it works. Reductionism has limitations because complex systems and human beings aren’t easily reduced to boxes.

Intuition is the source for imagination because it represents knowledge that arises from the unknown.

The importance of intuition in innovation cannot be overstated. Intuition is source for imagination because it brings knowledge from the unknown, rather than relying on memory and prior experience. All innovation occurs as a result of identifying some new constituent or novel application or a twist on an old application applied in a different arena. Intuition has a fundamental and vital role.

As the dawn of the innovation age rises, every employee, manager, team and business owner needs to have a grasp of their intuition capabilities and ideally training so they can fruitfully grow, identify and seize opportunities for new product and service innovations. In today’s world anyone can be an innovator, from the 6th grade student to an artist, a stay at home mom, or retiree.

In terms of broad economics and a return on value, intuition is ultimately sustainable. Paying attention to intuition and investing in intuition awareness in business requires low investment costs to generate potential high value outcomes. Companies and research facilities that invest in developing intuition tools and technologies ultimately stand to gain quantifiable innovation benefits, which may also lead to further intuition mediated developments.

Intuition and Health

A more intuitive person has a greater likelihood of being in and maintaining a higher level of personal health, lifestyle and well-being. Because of their intuitive alertness, they are more likely to be proactive, invest in self-care and make any necessary dietary or lifestyle changes. They are also less likely to maintain negative stress levels.

Health care costs can be minimized when intuitive approaches stand alongside and sometimes displace traditional approaches where they are more effective. In the diagnostic field, intuitive healers and diagnosticians often work in tandem with medical practitioners and, where they do, can spot things a routine medical analysis might miss. Of course, resistance and fear still exist in the medical profession and in society at large. When these views change as a result of greater understanding, everyone will benefit.

The potential contribution of intuition as both a diagnostic aid and an instrument of healing is large. The benefits of using intuition can be publicized and
recognized by institutional leaders and professions. The application of intuitive diagnosis and healing needs to be balanced with respect for the belief systems of healing recipients along with respect for the extensive system of peer-review and development that exists in medical science. In the scientific end of health research, the use of intuition will likely reveal substantive connections that foster radical innovations and better and more preventive approaches to health.

The development of peer-review systems for intuitive healers and practitioners would likely increase public acceptance and improve their recognition as professionals. Extensive communications and dialogue with medical professionals, licensing bodies, governments, health and insurance organizations are
needed to help drive the understanding and acceptance of the unstructured nature of intuitive work while ensuring that practitioners reflect a desired level of quality and experience.

Continued publication of success stories and examples of how alternative approaches are most effectively used will continue to make acceptance grow among the general population. Fusion approaches that encompass both Western and Eastern medical sciences will likely grow in popularity as effective results become known.

Greater intuition is also needed in public health control so we can receive early and timely alerts in identifying potential instances of mass health risk or pandemics and maximize the communication and distribution of precautions and preventive practices.

Instinctively we recognize the enormous power of having a connected world that can now distribute learning and aware ness instantaneously, thereby having created the capability to immediately raise consciousness and know-how on any matter simultaneously. We have become one mind.

Intuition, Ecology and Environment
It is through listening to the innate wisdom of our deeper intuition that we become more aware of our care-taking role over the living planet and its resources. Our collective intuition and the will to listen to it can help identify the most effective approaches for managing and sharing resources and restoring them for the benefit of all of us who share this planet.

Intuition, Public Security, and Conflict
Conflict and mediating our differences are still great impediments. Whether it is reconciling our differences one-on-one or drawing a line where two opposing units of a country or culture are engaged in the combat of difference, intuition has a role.

Here it becomes a clarifying agent, to distill the truth of remote separate-
ness in the ways we see ourselves and the ways of seeing that we don’t accept
and to help create pathways, if not for acceptance, then at least for mutual remedies.

Resolving conflict is strong yet delicate work, where precedent doesn’t always suggest a direction for the future. A well-developed intuitive sense is a prerequisite for success for anyone working in this area. The best mediators, as is generally known in the industry, have a strong intuitive “nose” for their work. Academic approaches to mediation apply best in analyzing, reporting and documenting issues while field performance is often performed without the luxury of extensive reflective time and analysis, and is still the best predictor of future success. A well-developed intuition sense and timing often fill in the gaps.

The more intuitive we become as individuals and as a global society, the better and harder we will work to find solutions in chaos, clarity in conflict and hope in reason. Through intuition, we will raise the questions we should be asking, and evolve together while appreciating the value of our differences. Perhaps, sooner than we think, we will celebrate them.

As the demand for accountability and public administration continue to grow, two important areas of public administration stand out as fertile ground for the presence of intuitive reason: l) Public security, in the perception and evaluation of potential security threats and 2) Health and Environmental Administration, in the assessment of potential health and public risks in the case of changing biological conditions, potential pandemics and threatening environments, such as weather warnings or contamination risks to air and water.

The use of intuition consultants to assist diagnostics in forensics and criminal investigation has proven itself to be often useful, worthwhile and fruitful. A context-relevant, well-developed intuition sense for leaders and decision makers could be extremely helpful for the effective handling of these cases, as could be the development of relevant intuition-based anticipation models. Alternatively, intuitive consultants could be sourced as a resource or to ‘gut-proof’ strategies.

Intuition is ultimately sustainable.

Intuition and Multi-Cultural Experience
All cultures are social experiments in humanity, centered around differing regions, shared histories, stories, customs, language, beliefs, curiosities and preferences. While it is tempting to suggest that some cultures are more intuitive than others, it’s more interesting to find out how certain cultures are more intuitive, understand why this capacity developed, how their lives and lifestyles are affected and what we can learn from them.

Final Thoughts
The re-evaluation of intuition, increased development of intuition awareness in the general population, and greater research on the role of intuition in many areas of society, have merit and are likely to play a very significant and important role in shaping a more enlightened world. With innumerable applications, tractable linkages, and innovative potential outcomes, establishing a new value for intuition will have a great impact on the world we choose to create tomorrow.

References
Revonsuo, A. (2009). Inner presence: Consciousness as a biological phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: The MI.T. Press.
Sen, Tulshi. (2005). Ancient secrets of success for today’s world. Toronto: Omnilux Publications.
Swami, D. (2009, April). Spiritual accounting (Lecture). University of Toronto.
Tesolin, A.L. (2009, February), Intuition as a sustainable business advantage. Management Magazine. Publication of the Certified Management Accountants, Canada, 15