The Business Case for Gender Intelligence

Last week Francis Cholle spoke at The Girls’ Lounge (www.thegirlslounge.com) at Davos addressing The Female Quotient and why embracing feminine values is the key to success in the 21st century.  He introduced a project The Human Company is co-creating called Skirting the Rules (www.skirtingtherules.com), which is a social enterprise that frees women—and men—to create a culture elevating feminine values to manifest a more balanced and purposeful world.

IMG_4401Francis and The Human Company are co-authoring this movement and a book along with Deborah Burns, president of DLB Ventures and former client of ours, to help women recognize and validate feminine values that are the key to success in the 21st century, including receptivity, creativity, empathy, openness, and inclusivity.

The speakers at The Girls’ Lounge included:

Laura Liswood, Secretary General, The Council of Women World Leaderships

John Gerzema, CEO of BAV and NY Times best selling author The Athena Doctrine

Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief at The Huffington Post

Amanda Ellis, New Zealand Ambassador to the UN

Michel Morelli, Vice-President, Business & Consumer Marketing, AOL

Micheale Roth, CEO of IPG

Carolyn Everson, VP Global Solutions, Facebook

The Girls’ Lounge at Davos had 3 objectives:

– to be a destination for the 18% of the year’s attendees that are women (sadly we wish this number were much higher, but it seems indicative of global trends).

– to allow for productive conversations in the intimacy of a lounge designed by women for women and facilitate relationships to develop collaboration and toolkits for change.

– to ask and record influential women about their legacy and commitments when it comes to gender equality (starting a legacy series).

We believe the 21st century is about integrating all that is feminine into the current masculine hierarchical structures that permeate most of our societies. Please note that when we talk about “feminine” and “masculine” we’re talking about energies or archetypes—such as in yin and yang—both men and women have some form of feminine and masculine energies. And both women and men can cultivate these two energies. Success in the 21st century will require keeping in mind what each energy represents and how they complement (and can’t exist without) each other.

This discussion is heading the direction of what we call Gender Intelligence, really being fluent in both a feminine and a masculine mindset and being able to move easily between them as necessary.

The question is:  How do you get Gender Intelligence?  Because wanting to understand someone else’s point of view and having the skills to stand in someone else’s shoes, tolerate what you see, take it in, learn from it, and take positive action are entirely different things.  We see this repeatedly in our domestic politics, in horrifying domestic and international events, and honestly, in our own offices and homes.

We’re going to do a series of blog posts about Gender Intelligence and how to develop it.  Business research shows that the best way to innovate is to focus on people and culture.  So in our blog posts we will focus on changing culture and helping people train to change perceptions, beliefs and behavior and to create diversity and inclusion of both men and women, feminine and masculine values. And while making the case for gender parity in the workplace is a moral issue, it turns out that hiring women is a truly sound business practice.  The reason at the core of it:  diversity.  The broader the range of opinions, backgrounds and experience contributing to an organization, the richer the foundation to draw from and the more likely a project it is to succeed.  This is the case for startups, high-tech ventures and multinational corporations.

Some key statistics from Joann Krotz’s recent release Being Equal Doesn’t Mean Being the Same

  1. Women-led, venture-backed high-tech companies used about a third less capital and averaged 12% higher annual revenues compared to similar startups run by men.
  2. Women-led startups show lower failure rates than those led by their male counterparts.
  3. Multinational corporations with the most women on their boards reported a 26% higher return.
  4. McKinsey & Company found that operating profits were 56% higher at international companies with the most women board directors.

At the Human Company, we’ve developed a tool called the Intuitive Compass® that diagnoses how masculine and feminine energies are being used in a particular situation.  To go with it, we’ve developed a mindset called Intuitive Intelligence (closely linked to Gender Intelligence) that can be used to develop skill at navigating between the two energies.  You can check out a previous post on the Intuitive Compass here.

We look forward to continuing this timely, essential conversation.

Playing while you work. The key to success?

Screen Shot 2016-01-17 at 10.47.41 PMThe following article about the work we do at The Human Company was published on the January 9, 2016 in the magazine L’Echo.

 “Disruption.” Such is the word that describes the powerful upheaval of the rules of the economic game, due to globalization and digital technologies. When the methods of the past don’t work anymore for the problems of the present, finding new keys to success becomes essential. Consultant Francis Cholle is working on just that.

 By Stéphanie Fontenoy

 French-American Francis Cholle, business consultant and founder of the consulting firm, The Human Company, presents us with his Intuitive Compass®, a true compass for innovation in the hands of business leaders to better navigate in this capricious economic weather. As in Edgar Allen Poe’s A Descent Into the Maelstrom, the one who will be saved is the one who will know how to use their intuitive intelligence in the face of the storm. How? By anchoring instinct to reason, so that “a non-rational logic” emerges, holding within new forms of conflict resolution and understanding of complexity. “Intuition is a homing instinct able to forage in areas where rationality would get lost,” explains the expert. His Intuitive Compass® is comprised of two axes: the North-South axis, which connects reason to instinct, and the East-West axis, the results and “play”. Through a quiz, each company can discover its position thanks to this “compass” and find new roads to explore. To create this model, Francis Cholle, a graduate from HEC, not only drew from his experience as an entrepreneur and business owner, but also from clinical psychology, the teaching of yoga and meditation, and operatic singing, fields that he practiced professionally, as well as many other areas of study and scientific research. His workshops or “Labs” have been taken on by several Fortune 500 companies, including L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, SAP-Business Objects, Bristol Myers Squibb, Hachette, Lagardère, Veolia and Ralph Lauren. He is the author of the bestseller L’Intelligence Intuitive (“To succeed in a different way”) and in English, of a book for leaders, The Intuitive Compass (Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct).

You introduce the concept of play and techniques borrowed from the theater in your business workshops. Why?

Because the problems we need to solve today require solutions that we can’t access with traditional thinking strategies. It has been proven neurologically that play allows us to call upon layers of the brain where forms of intelligence only accessible through play, meditation, psychotropic drugs or dream reside. When we play, we are less in “self-control”, we are more open, more creative, and able to take more risks.

In what way is intuitive intelligence particularly important nowadays?

Because we have to realize that this “disruption” phenomenon that we are faced with now is not simply a passing phase to get through, but a new norm, a “new normal” that requires a fresh look at the world. We rediscover that change is really the only thing that never changes, whereas so far, we had a much more static vision of the world.

The models taught in business schools do not fit this new reality?

Things are changing everywhere, including in business schools. Nevertheless, I think students should get help rethinking their relationship with complexity: admit, on the one hand, that resolving complexity is a field where linear, logical and strategic ways of thinking are not adapted to the demands of “disruption”, and on the other hand, that the human race has never ceased to solve complex situations through hundreds and thousands of years, long before the rise of modern logic. It’s an innate aptitude of man that transcends culture and training, that we have access to at any given time. It’s this universal competence that I help leaders achieve in their companies, in a practical and concrete fashion, at the heart of new methods of management, change organization and realization, new approaches to their markets, their know-how and creation of value. It is what the next generation has to discover and learn to mobilize, in business and elsewhere.

Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” You mention a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Kary Mullis, who explains that his greatest discovery was made while he was driving, with an idle mind, far from his laboratory and research work. What does that tell us about intuition?

The IBM Global CEO study of 2010 revealed that close to two thirds of the leaders of small and large businesses, in 60 countries and 33 sectors, considered that creativity would become their most important skill during the next five years. In his latest book, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, explains that to face “disruption”, one has to rely more on good creative people than strategists. Other studies have showed that a large part of this creativity resides in our subconscious. We access it while we sleep, of course, but also through play or when our mind escapes the conscious straightjacket of rational thinking. I really like these words by a foundational scientist of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, “No, no, you are not thinking, you are only being logical!” It summarizes well the concept that thought is not limited to what we traditionally call logic, in science. Playing, like any other activity that allows us to disconnect from conscious logical thinking, therefore opens the door to creative intuition. The advantage of play is that it is an active mode that can easily be integrated inside work and collaboration processes. American medical researchers from the University of Washington used it a few years ago. In just three weeks, they obtained results they hadn’t been able to reach in ten years of research, by inviting non-scientist gamers to take part in an interactive game, Fold It.

During your Labs, you ask participants to remove their shoes. For what reason?

Shoes, just like ties or vests, are part of the prerogative of the professional “persona”, the character we build at work. By removing these accessories that contribute to the “persona”, we allow without any particular effort for the people present to be naturally more authentic, so they live less inside their heads and more inside their bodies, so they access what they feel more and their intellect less, and therefore access original creative information.

 Describe to us the play session you use to create this realization that another form of deeper and more creative intelligence lies dormant inside us.

The group must recreate the alphabet, from A to Z, with closed eyes, one letter at a time, following alphabetical order, but according to a random order of participation of each member in the group. The group is not allowed to agree on a specific strategy prior or during the exercise. Participants are only allowed to speak to say a letter. No one knows who will speak or when. If two people say a letter at the same time or if the alphabetical order is not respected, we start over from the beginning. I face the group with a complex situation for which there is no preconceived solution. The logical mind is powerless when it comes to solving this situation, naturally complex. Nonetheless, the logical mind is called upon to respect the alphabetical order. However, the group always ends up succeeding. This demonstrates to leading executives that there is another way to solve problems than that of logical and strategic thinking. Participants need to keep their rational intelligence active, but also let another way of thinking emerge, that of non-rational logic.

 What is the goal?

I want to recreate spaces and times where people function connected to each other on a very instinctive, universal, efficient level because it is beyond opinions, emotions and all expressions of separation. It’s a place that can give rise to a unanimity that could not be reached in another manner, and certainly not that fast, because we can always debate things forever. Culturally, we are very concerned with debating ideas. The goal is to reach a quality of relating to oneself and others that goes beyond the limits of the mental, rational and conscious mind, to accomplish a universal convergence that will open a previously unseen range of possibilities and reinvention. It’s a cathartic experience for each participant. Once this experience has been shared by the group, the executive committee for example, there emerges a sense of the possible and consensus. The quality of the interaction between the members of the group becomes completely different. New solutions appear and concrete actions can be decided upon. The next step is building precise and detailed action plans and allowing each participant to make these new solutions their own and become engaged in implementing them. Finally, the ultimate step is to establish these new practices in the daily life of the group and its participants. This requires support through time to fight individual and organizational inertias. Yet we manage, with time and particular care, to develop this new approach in a durable manner, and impress it on minds, work processes and thought patterns.

Your methodology is used by companies like L’Oréal, Lagardère, Estée Lauder Companies. Concretely, how does it work?

I worked recently with a subsidiary of a French multinational company in Japan, in the beauty industry. This group historically had difficulties breaking into the Japanese market. One of the problems is the adaptation of the company’s development model to the particularities of Japan, as much inside as outside the company. For example, the Japanese don’t deal with problems the way Westerners do. Their approach is contextual. The western way of thinking tends to face a problem straight on, like an arrow on a trajectory to its targeted objective, while Japanese people move forward progressively and according to a “hidden order” for the western mind. This is how they solve problems and lead projects. The alphabet game allowed the company’s executive committee to go beyond this very limiting cultural gap. It allowed the Japanese members of the executive committee to feel understood and the Westerners to better grasp the expectations of the Japanese. They managed to better work together and better overcome their challenges without having to understand all the nuances and differences of their respective managerial cultures. They’ve integrated the exercise and repeat it each time the committee meets, as if to find the same wavelength beyond their cultural differences. Once a group has perceived the depth and power of this process, they implement and use it. This allows them to immediately work better together and efficiently, rapidly, solve complex challenges born from the “disruption” they must face. The stakes and the speed of change are such that we have to learn new swift attitudes and new creative ways of thinking at the same time as we solve pressing issues.

Have you had results backed up by figures?

Yes, always. Our approach is built for that purpose. Most of my clients – companies with several billions in revenue and thousands of employees – like many companies today, are confronted with outdated business models, because of the global competition and digital newcomers, to the extent that some of them are experiencing losses. The reinvention of their business model was absolutely necessary. I’m thinking among others of Hachette Media (press) in the United States or Lagardère Unlimited (sports marketing) in Europe and Africa. In record time – less than a year – our approach allowed them to identify and implement the changes necessary, to get back on track with a viable business model, to regain considerable market shares and to reach a good level of profitability, in spite of a constantly changing competitive environment. “Disruption” doesn’t frighten them anymore. They are now equipped to face it.

Thrive in Disruption at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference

“Wisdom 2.0 is a conference tackling one of the biggest challenges of today’s age. Connect through technology, but do so in a way that supports a person’s well-being, work effectiveness, and is ultimately useful to the world.”

— Inc Magazine

I am very excited to announce my participation in the Wisdom 2.0 Conference (Jackie, attach link to “Wisdom 2.0 conference”: http://www.wisdom2summit.com/) people’s stage contest.  The conference will take place on February 20-22, 2016 in San Francisco.

The initial voting process is open to anyone and everyone. In order to vote, you will first need to register for the People’s Stage voting system here in order to log in and cast your vote.

Here is the link to my video on the wisdom 2.0 page: http://wisdom2contest.com/?contest=video-detail&video_id=198

I’ve included the summary of my video below.  Please take the time to check out the video contest and vote.  I believe that it is an interesting and essential conference and that I can truly help people by spreading our message there.

Thrive in Disruption and Create and Sustainable World

We are The Human Company, a unique management-consulting firm. We work in a very original way that makes organizations fit to thrive in disruption. Beyond a successful business approach for our Fortune 500 clients, it’s a practical philosophy for creative sustainable living, grounded in real science. To make it actionable we designed a model for decision-making: The Intuitive Compass® and a skillset for true leadership: Intuitive Intelligence. It can be learned and applied to anything, from education to politics, to science or simply to daily life. How does it work? It brings out the universal in everyone, the part in us that lives beyond ideology and culture. That’s how change, breakthroughs and innovation can happen. That’s where we all need to work from together to create a sustainable world. It’s actually quite simple. Everybody can learn it and apply it!

 

Three Key Facts That Will Change the Way You Think About Creativity

Excerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-BassScreen Shot 2015-12-13 at 10.26.32 PM

In recent years, neuroscience research has revealed three key facts that may change forever the way we think about and approach creativity:

– Instinct plays a leading role in complex decision making.

– Eighty percent of our grey matter is dedicated to nonconscious thought.

– Imaginative play is one of the most direct means of activating our creativity and problem-solving abilities

These three discoveries open up unprecedented opportunities for progress, creativity, and efficiency, if we only embrace the instinctual and unconscious aspects of the mind and the randomness and chaos of life.

The uncomfortable part of this is that we are not used to relying on instinct and the unconscious, and we are certainly not used to accepting randomness or chaos. We are used to seeing life and reality as linear and logical when they aren’t. Success in modern times mean making a leap from seeing the world as we think it operates to seeing how it really operates. In reality both life and the whole of the human mind operate in a way that is closer to chaos than to linear order.

Dealing with Chaos and Uncertainty

Excerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-BassScreen Shot 2015-12-06 at 9.16.34 PM

In my seminars at L’Oréal, SAP, and other companies, I often recount Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” a story that beautifully illustrates this aspect of chaos theory. It describes how three brothers go out on their fishing boat only to be caught in “the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens.” The storm drives their boat into a powerful whirlpool, the maelstrom of the title. One brother is thrown over board into the whirlpool and quickly carried under. Another brother goes mad with terror. But the third brother is suddenly struck by the awesome beauty of the maelstrom. With an inner calm he notices that some objects are being spun around at the top of the whirlpool rather than sucked into it. Unable to convey this to his mad brother, he submits himself to the sea, cling onto a barrel, and rides the maelstrom until it subsides and he is rescued. In the meantime the mad brother, because he fights the chaos rather than submitting to it, drowns when their boat spirals down to the depths. Although the experience turns the surviving brother’s hair white and makes him look older that his age, it give him a deep insight into the working of nature, and an enduring serenity.

I always remind participants that Poe’s story shows that the way each one of us chooses to handle confusion and chaos may have a huge impact on the final outcome for everybody. Each brother acted his own way and by doing so chose his own final outcome. In Poe’s story, when the third brother decides, in spite of his fear, to give up the fight with the maelstrom, he actually facilitates the organizing principle creates all the marvels that have evolved in nature. In our minds, it brings reason, feeling, and instinct into balance, if only we have the wisdom to trust it and stop trying to override it.

How Intuitive Intelligence Can Help Us In Challenging Times

In light of the horrible events that took place in France last week, we would like to dedicate this post to the victims, the survivors and their families.
Screen Shot 2015-11-23 at 2.55.06 PM

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

–Thomas Merton

How do we move beyond a system that is so broken that events of this magnitude happen more and more regularly?  How do we change our value system to integrate the deep chasm that seems to divide us?  How can we even believe change this is possible, never mind make positive decisions that can propel humanity forward?  To make deeper and better decisions, you need imagination, patience, and open mind, and tolerance for ambiguity and confusion.

This calls for a new awareness.  It requires us to balance our faith in logic with the secular wisdom of instinct.  In doing so, we will need to tap into our intuition, an attribute of the feminine part of our psyche.  Intuition opens up new possibilities to feed the masculine part in us, which is ruled and often restricted by the logical mind.  And that is the message of Intuitive Intelligence: anything is possible when the feminine and masculine energies join to cooperate creatively, where improbable solutions can come to our rescue.

In our postmodern age we are still not used to the discomfort of the unknown, the demands of the feminine, and the fact that we are not in control.  But with determination, courage,and faith we can surrender to another belief system, one that enables us to overcome our fear and escape the deadening impact of our need for control.  As is the case with any creative journey, we have no guarantee of success, and no one can show us the way, because the way is unique for each one of us.  But we can receive guidance from the part of ourselves that knows better–the intuitive voice of feminine wisdom–and finally find our way out of control mode into a novel clarity and a deeper relationship with life.

Just as it always is for the mythical hero, the path we’re facing is filled with challenges and unknown factors.  However, we can choose to look at these challenges as parts of a creative process:  the process of evolution.  And we can rely on Intuitive Intelligence to help with decision making and creative problem solving in these unpredictable times.  It will provide unexpected creative answers, which will feel like magic to us because we cannot always explain them.  In this particular time of many unprecedented challenges we have a unique opportunity to engage and be taught in new ways.

There are many real-life successful examples in the business world that prove there is a plausible route beyond conventional logic.  This will always require a leap of faith, but the leap can be an educated one.  We need to rethink the way we think.  We need reinitialize our thinking program in light of a new scientific understanding of the power of instinct and play and the quantum laws of matter, which show the paradox of our limited individuality within the holistic force of our interdependence and an unlimited number of possibilities.  In this new world view, power has to be reconsidered, money deconstructed and reconstructed into its real purpose:  the prosperity of all.  We’re called to move on.  No time to waste.  A new generation is already there, and we can all do it.  Together we can create a more meaningful, more prosperous, and more balanced world, It requires some adjustments and faith, but it is possible.

The Lakota people have a saying: “It is not about peace on earth but peace with earth.”  When we observe nature, we see how everything and everyone in nature contributes to the whole; that nothing can exist without the others, the conflict, tension, destruction, complexity,  and mystery are also part of it; and that the sum of it all is the most mystifying system we could ever imagine and learn from.

Decoding your Intuitive Compass®

Screen Shot 2015-11-01 at 10.35.29 PMAs promised, here is our blog post on decoding your Intuitive Compass®.  If you missed our “How you Make Decisions Questionnaire”, check it out here.  For more information about the Intuitive Compass® please check out our July 6, 2015 blog post or our book.

NORTHEAST QUADRANT

In this quadrant you can see how analytical and methodical you are about making a decision, how focused you are on getting the results you want, how you manage the time you have, an how you organize your environment and your resources to come to the best decision.  A high score in the northeast quadrant mans there is a high level of logical thinking and organization involved in your decision making; it shows your determination in the decision-making process and how well your organizational skills are mobilized for this. Conversely, a low score means that for you the process of decision-making does not follow a logical scheme.  When circumstances call for swift, insightful or instinctual ways of making a decision –a capacity very much associated with the southeast quadrant –then little organization makes sense and being methodical is not relevant.  But a low score under regular business circumstances means you would benefit from adopting a more rational and methodical approach to optimize your process of decision making. You may want to talk to a friend who makes good business decisions and manages his or her time, environment, data, and thoughts well.

SOUTHEAST QUADRANT

In the southeast quadrant, you get feedback on three aspects of your approach to the decision-making process: your level of commitment to doing whatever it takes to make a decision, regardless of how challenging it may be; your degree of clarity about the possible outcomes of your decision; and finally, your determination to make the best decision possible. A high score indicates a clear sense of about two or three of these aspects.  A low score indicates a lack of commitment to making a decision and/or making the best one, and/or a lack of evaluation of the potential outcome of your decision.  Depending on what you seek or have to achieve with your decision making you may want to analyze and try to understand why you’re not more committed.  In your analysis you any want to question whether you approach serves you well in your life; if it does not, consider how you can reframe your approach and empower yourself to be more committed when making decisions.  You may also want to spend time reflecting on the potential desired outcome of your decision so that you become more motivated to achieve it.  A lack of determination to make a decision may be the result of a desire to avoid dealing with certain feelings: discomfort, pain, fear, and so on.  This is why if you have a low southeast score you may want to put in in perspective with your southwest score and look for a correlation between the two low scores as the potential reason for your low score in the southeast quadrant. Compare both scores in the southeast and the southwest.  If they are both low it means that whether it is about being efficient and getting results or whether it is about play and free flow it is hard for you to commit beyond what’s logical.  You may consider looking into your ability to trust and examining whether you have underlying trust issues when making a particular decision or making decisions in general.  If it is the first case (trust issue around a particular decision), you may want to review the circumstances around this decision and the consequences of this decision.  Try to evaluate whether these are significant enough to justify your low score. If it is the second case (a trust issue around making decisions in general), you may want to either discuss it with a good friend whom you consider grounded and perspicacious or talk about it with a professional coach.

NORTHWEST QUADRANT

The northwest quadrant tells you about your openness to new perspectives and to the various options available to you in the process of making a decision.  It also gives feedback on your willingness to analyze and reflect on your expectations about the potential outcome of your decision.  If your score is low, chances are it will be difficult for you to evaluate precisely how successful your decision was, how successful it could have been, or what it is that you gained from the fact you made a decision, because you don’t have clear expectations.  If, however you made a decision with a clear strategy, chances are it will be easier for you to accept the outcome of your decision no matter what. Even more important, it will be easier to improve your decision-making process, thereby increasing your satisfaction with the potential outcome.  This is because the clearer you are about what you wish to achieve and the path to it, the more flexible and open to improvisation you can be in the process of getting there—and the more prepared you are to accept the outcome of your decision, because it was planned out and thought out rather than random and thoughtless. It is much easier to accept failure after you have strategically thought out a decision than it is when you did not do your homework; in the latter case, playing the victim of circumstances can be an easy cop-out yet completely disempowering.  Moreover, a lack of clarity about making a decision will induce a lack of openness, which in turn will inhibit you from exploring various options for decision making and different motivations to commit to making the decision. A high score in the northwest means that you have clarity about your expectations and an open disposition to new ideas and discoveries about your decision making process, your ideas and your beliefs. A high score in the northwest combined with a high score in the southeast will further optimize your chances of making the best decision.

SOUTHWEST QUADRANT

The southwest quadrant shows your ability to be comfortable while making a decision even when circumstances are uncertain and require you to explore beyond the bounds of logic and let go of mental control over the process.  This quadrant is key in approaching creative decisions, as these often require either subjective evaluations or estimations beyond what we know and what is logical. Such questions ask for another type of decision-making process:  using our intuition to explore our gut feelings and tolerate the unknown.  A high score indicates that you are comfortable making decisions with what many people might consider incomplete data points, or in situations where there are apparently conflicting data. If you have a high score here, you probably can tolerate a high level of ambiguity, and you may very well pursue potential solution in unusual ways; for example, by looking for inspiration outside of the immediate context of the issue at hand.  There’s a potential downside to a high score in the southwest: if it is not balanced by high scores in the northwest (where you connect great ideas to actionable strategies and plans) or the southeast (where you put those plans into action and turn them into concrete results), your imaginative, intuitive ideas may never see the light of day or at the least, may not realize their greatest potential. Conversely, a low score indicates that you could benefit from a more experimental approach when you make a decision.  It would probably be useful for you to reflect on how you much trust more—within the thresholds of integrity and prudence—when encountering new situations.  You may want to improve your tolerance for confusion and try developing a sense of playfulness that will enable you to explore your decisions more easily and enrich the process.  If your score in the southwest quadrant is low, you may also want to reflect on how southwest capabilities have become key to making successful decision in today’s economic environment.  Of course, you need to consider your southwest score in relationship to your scores in the other three quadrants, as optimum results and the deepest breakthroughs will be gains when the scores in all four quadrants are high and are therefore in balance with one another.

How and Why to Apply Gut Feelings to Business

Screen Shot 2015-11-08 at 9.46.41 PMI know we promised you an decoding of your intuitive compass, and with our greatest apologies, it will come next week.

In the meantime…

Because our instinct is responsible for our survival, it actually makes complete sense for it to be heavily involved in sophisticated decisions. It has been doing that job for thousands of years. So it follows that, in important matters that will affect our lives, our instinct should be the first and foremost judge of whether or not a decision is good. A study conducted by neuroscientists at Princeton University confirms this fact. The aim of the study was to demonstrate how a gut feeling may rise before a person becomes conscious of what the brain has registered. In the study, students were directed to pick out figures—people or cars—in a series of photos that flashed by on a computer screen. The pictures flashed by four at a time, and the participants were told to scan only two of them, either those above and below the center point, or those to the left and right. Eye tracking confirmed that they did just that. But brain scans showed that the students’ brains registered the presence of people or cars even when the figures appeared in photos that they were not paying attention to. The brain tallies cues, big and small, consciously and not, it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.

A gut feeling is often the result of some part of our brain taking in and processing information that we are not conscious of having taken in and processed. This study demonstrates how we sometimes are not consciously aware of all of the information that we in fact have already registered at some level—in this case visually.

When a gut feeling arises before a person becomes conscious of it, it can enrich their ability to make a decision. Not only that, but sometimes logical problem solving is simply not the best option. Sometimes the best way to come up with an appropriate answer to a logical problem is to base it on a gut feeling. Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist who has studied the limits of rational thinking in decision making explains that, contrary to popular wisdom, sometimes there is no optimal strategy attainable to solve a problem. He gives the example of a presidential candidate who has to plan a fifty-city tour. The candidate would like to start and end in the same city and obviously cover the shortest distance. The candidate would like to start and end in the same city and obviously cover the shortest distance. There are so many possible itineraries that not even the fastest computer can optimize the candidate’s choice in a lifetime, a century, or even a millennium.

When optimization is out of reach we must rely on our gut feelings instead of logical deduction. And this applies to any situation in which rules are not completely explicit, uncertainty is prevalent, or rule breaking is an option. This obviously pertains to winning a negotiation, leading an organization, marketing a new product, investing in the stock market, or training executives. Of course, for every one of these endeavors good enough strategies exist, but for us to find and choose these valid strategies we need to resort to what Gigerenzer calls a “rule of thumb,” which he defines as the product of a mental process that tries to identify the most important information and ignore the rest, taking advantage of an evolved capacity of the brain to do so. For Gigerenzer, expert of the intelligence of the unconscious, “it would be erroneous to assume to intelligence is necessarily conscious and deliberate.” He adds, “We know more than we can tell.”

Excerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass

HOW YOU MAKE DECISIONS Questionnaire

Screen Shot 2015-11-01 at 10.35.29 PMWhere do you fall on the Intuitive Compass®? A great way to start understanding the Intuitive Compass® is to actually use it. Take a few minutes to answer the following questionnaire; your answers will give you a snapshot of how you make decisions. Each person’s Intuitive Compass® is unique, revealing something about the person’s approach to a specific topic (in this case, decision making) at a specific moment in time (today!)

For more information about the Intuitive Compass® please check out our July 6, 2015 blog post or our book.

For each question, rate yourself from 1 to 5 (1 is least, 5 is most) as it relates to how you approach decision making. When you are finished we will explain how to chart your answers on a diagram of the Intuitive Compass. We hope you will gain insights on how to optimize your decision-making process in the future.

Questionnaire
1. How willing are you to review your creative options with an open mind while you are in the process of making a decision?
2. How willing are you to systematically gather facts and data surrounding your decisions?
3. How willing are you to evaluate the potential outcome of your decisions before you make them?
4. How organized are you in making the best use of the time you have to make decisions?
5. How willing are you to approach making a decision with a playful attitude—that is, not focusing on expected tangible results?
6. How committed are you to making proactive decisions even when the decision-making process is challenging and it would be easier to avoid making a decision altogether?
7. How ready are you to question your own ideas and beliefs while making a decision?
8. How willing are you to be present to your emotions, regardless of whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, while you are in the process of making a decision?
9. How willing are you to organize your environment and resources to optimize your decision making?
10. How willing are you to openly explore new concepts and new perspectives while making a decision?
11. How committed are you to making the best decision possible?
12. How accepting are you of being confused while you are in the process of making a decision?

To calculate how you score in each quadrant:
For the northeast quadrant, add questions # 2, 4, 9 and divide total by 3.
Northeast Quadrant Score

For the southeast quadrant, add questions # 3, 6, 11 and divide total by 3.
Southeast Quadrant Score

For the northwest quadrant, add questions # 1, 7, 10 and divide total by 3.
Northwest Quadrant Score

For the southwest quadrant, add questions # 5, 8, 12 and divide total by 3.
Southwest Quadrant Score

Your Intuitive Compass®

Please print the image that goes with this post and follow the instructions below.

Mark a dot in each quadrant at the point on the line that is closest to your score for that quadrant and then draw lines to connect the dots in all quadrants. Use the following sample compass to plot your own score and connect the dots.

Next week we will talk about how to decode your compass.

Copyright © 2012 Francis Cholle (text and images)
thehumancompany.com

Thriving in the New Normal: Change

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 12.20.17 PMIt is a truism that the one thing that doesn’t change in life is change; we are constantly dealing with the unknown.  A decade immersed in the performing art and cultural studies gave me a new perspective on the how modern world deals with change.  When directing or acting, I had to accept that great art is not about control.  It is about having discipline in the preparation and surrendering during the performance.  Management, at least the way I had experienced it, is about controlling the environment to ensure flawless execution and reach the expected results. Management is a powerful means to reach one’s ends, but my artistic journey made me realize that in the modern world, our fear of change and our inability to deal creatively with the unpredictability of change lead us to seek control over the process of life.  This means that although management should be about stabilizing our environment to facilitate the natural creative process belying any human activity, we attempt to control the process to secure the results we want; we do everything we can to eliminate the unknown, but in doing so we work against the creative nature of life.

In recent years, neuroscience research has revealed three key facts that may change forever the way we think about and approach creativity:

      Instinct plays a leading role in complex decision making.

      Eighty percent of our grey matter is dedicated to nonconscious thought.

      Imaginative play is one of the most direct means of activating our creativity and problem-solving abilities.

These three discoveries open up unprecedented opportunities for progress, creativity, and efficiency, if we only embrace the instinctual and unconscious aspects of the mind and the randomness and chaos of life.

The uncomfortable part of this is that we are not used to relying on instinct and the unconscious, and we are certainly not used to accepting randomness or chaos.  We are used to seeing life and reality as linear and logical when they aren’t.  Success in modern times mean making a leap from seeing the world as we think it operates to seeing how it really operates.  In reality both life and the whole of the human mind operate in a way that is closer to chaos than to linear order.

In my seminars at L’Oréal, SAP, and other companies, I often recount Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” a story that beautifully illustrates this aspect of chaos theory.  It describes how three brothers go out on their fishing boat only to be caught in “the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens.”  The storm drives their boat into a powerful whirlpool, the maelstrom of the title.  One brother is thrown overboard into the whirlpool and quickly carried under.  Another brother goes mad with terror. But the third brother is suddenly struck by the awesome beauty of the maelstrom.  With an inner calm he notices that some objects are being spun around at the top of the whirlpool rather than sucked into it.  Unable to convey this to his mad brother, he submits himself to the sea, cling onto a barrel, and rides the maelstrom until it subsides and he is rescued.  In the meantime the mad brother, because he fights the chaos rather than submitting to it, drowns when their boat spirals down to the depths. Although the experience turns the surviving brother’s hair white and makes him look older that his age, it give him a deep insight into the working of nature, and an enduring serenity.

I always remind participants that Poe’s story shows that the way each one of us chooses to handle confusion and chaos may have a huge impact on the final outcome for everybody.  Each brother acted his own way and by doing so chose his own final outcome.  In Poe’s story, when the third brother decides, in spite of his fear, to give up the fight with the maelstrom, he actually facilitates the organizing principle creates all the marvels that have evolved in nature. In our minds, it brings reason, feeling, and instinct into balance, if only we have the wisdom to trust it and stop trying to override it.