Category Archives: Strategy

Intuition as a Dynamic Adaptation Skill

mountain-morginsAside from business executives, there are other professionals who use intuition and instinct, and in some cases it is about crude survival tactics.  In war, life-and-death decisions must be made instantly, with little if any time for rational analysis.  And what’s more impressive is that the army has discovered that the ability to act effectively from gut feelings can be improved through training.

Time after time, the army has learned that “the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.”  The U.S. military has spent billions of dollars to protect against improvised explosive devices (IEDs), investing in hardware and technology to seek and destroy these homemade roadside bombs.  But experts say it is the human brain that has proven to be the most perceptive detection system.  Troops often credit their experience and perception—their gut feelings—for their ability to notice and foil IED attacks.

U.S. troops are a central focus of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others can.  Experience matters on the battleground.  If you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time.  Yet it is not just experience that matters.  Research suggests that something else is at work too.  “Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.”

Unfortunately, for some time feelings have been perceived as having little to do with rational decision making.  In fact, it has long been thought that they just get in the way of it.  But according to Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, “Now that position has reversed.  We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often because we’re not conscious of it.  These processes are at work continually.”  All scientific facts point to the evidence of an inner knowing preceding our rational mind.

Gut feelings about potential threats and opportunities are not always correct, and neuroscientists debate the conditions under which the feelings precede the conscious awareness of the clues themselves.  But our instinctual skills evolved to ensure our survival, and research findings suggest that in some people those skills are exquisitely sensitive.  So although the many serious researchers who say that gut feelings are not always correct do have a point, they may be missing the most important point: gut feelings have other functions that transcend the logic of reason, and to leverage their role fully we should not evaluate gut feelings on a narrow basis of whether they are right or wrong.

When we engage in solving a problem using logical skills, we follow certain rules or protocols based on past experience with a similar problem.  The rules and protocols we follow are generally well defined and measurable.  If we succeed in solving our problem, we typically attribute it to the efficacy of the protocols we followed.  If we fail at solving our problem, we can look back and analyze the steps we took to find where our approach failed.

Conversely, when we engage in solving a problem using our instincts, we follow a path that is highly specific to our problem and ourselves at a particular moment in time.  If someone asks us how we solved the problem, we may be able to recount what we did, but even a detailed recounting of what we did will not necessarily apply to a similar problem.  And that’s fine, because instinctual problem solving isn’t necessarily about replication; it’s about dynamic adaptation to circumstances.  The problem is that when we are successful, we (and others) may attribute our success simply to luck, even though calling on our instincts is a skill we can develop.   So although we may never be able to measure the efficacy of instinct-based problem solving precisely, that doesn’t mean it is a random phenomenon.  The difference between logic-based problem solving and instinct-based problem solving isn’t necessarily efficacy; the difference lies in our ability or inability to precisely identify cause and effect.  And when we can’t identify cause and effect, we often feel out of control or inefficient, when in fact we may have  some instinctual clues to next steps or answers.

5 Key Questions to Move Your Marketing/Branding Conversation Forward

Screen Shot 2015-08-02 at 9.50.35 PMExcerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass

Marketing and Branding can no longer be a one-way conversation in which companies dictate to consumers.  To achieve top-of-mind status with the new consumers–who are behaving more and more like community members, prosumers (professional consumers), and influencers–companies have to get into two-way conversations that begin with a mutual understanding and the delivery of a valuable service, and then move naturally to profitability and strong brand equity.

Interaction via social networks and codevelopment of products are two innovative ways the forward-thinking companies are revitalizing their marketing and branding strategies.  Answering the following questions can help you understand how your company truly sees its customers.

  • Do you focus on consumer simply as profit centers or as valued members of your community?
  • Do you approach profit as a function of the value you bring to your community members, or do you relate profit to shareholders’ return on investment, or both?
  • Are you only following trends, or are you truly innovating–are you able to be disruptively innovative?
  • Are you able to create retail experiences in which your employees/sales people are evangelists rather than paid mouthpieces?
  • Do you involve the consumer enough in the innovation and value creation of your company?

Answering these questions will guide you to review your relationship with your customers–what it is founded on and how it is facilitated.  Once you know how your organization views its customers, it will be easier to find ways to improve the relationship you have with them and succeed further in the new economic environment.

Learning About the New Business Paradigm from Generation Y

In March of 2010 I took a Virgin Air flight from Los Angeles to New York and mid-flight (thanks to Virgin’s on-board Internet access) I sent an email to my friend Max to get some feedback on a couple of projects I was working on. Max emailed me right back and said I really should get in touch with Jeff Rosenthal, whom he helpfully copied on the return email. Jeff is one of the co-founders of Summit Series, a community of millennial entrepreneurs that is redefining the relationship between business, politics, and philanthropy in a way that illustrates the dynamics of a new business paradigm. By the time I landed in New York Jeff and I had traded several emails sharing what we each do and are passionate about and he had put me in touch with the woman who would soon become the literary agent for my upcoming book, The Intuitive Compass (Jossey Bass, Oct 2011) . This experience made me curious to learn more about Summit Series, their goals, beliefs, and achievements, and what lessons they can offer to today’s business leaders. Read More

Michael Schrage and the Intuition Fallacy

There’s a post on the HBR blogTell Your Gut to Please Shut Up – by Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, in which he denounces the current trend about intuition as the key to quick, effective, successful decision-making.
Although Schrage’s argument seems to make perfect sense, and his ideas are well articulated, I think this is just another false debate about intuition. Read More

The Future of Magazines & Newspapers: A Conversation

Not long ago, at the airport, I had a conversation with John – a business man in his early 40s. 


Since I consult in the highly-challenged paper media industry I asked him how he feels about reading magazines and papers.

I assist a major firm identify the fundamentals of the media of the future, facilitate a culture of innovation and accelerate the reinvention of their business model. For those of you less familiar with the challenges of this industry in the US  let me tell you what they are in this digital age: Read More

“Intuitive Intelligence” on iTunes U: Top Download

The “Intuitive Intelligence” conference I put together for HEC MBA – first business school in Europe per FT ranking over the past 5 years – has become one of the top global downloads for iTunes U.

You can download it for free >>
iTunes U gathers more than 250,000 free podcasts of lectures, films, interviews from 600 prestigious universities and institutions from all over the world. The weekly statistics provided by Apple, routinely show 60,000 to 70,000 visitors. Read More

“Digital Intuition” versus Intuitive Intelligence: Where’s the Digital Trust?

One of the latest ideas to hit the buzz circuit is the concept of “digital intuition” – introduced by my6sense, a company which has developed a tool that serves up the most relevant
information
for us. They’ve developed a recommendation engine which TechCrunch says “separates
the signal from the noise and helps users shift their attention to the
content they care about most.”

The application learns what you like, then finds more. Read More

Intuitive Decision-Making: How Google Bought YouTube

How does an analytic company like Google make its
most important
decisions?

 If we are to believe the Google myth, we learn,
first and foremost,
that they test everything:

We test everything at Google. While Read More

Sustainability: Bill Gates Gets It Wrong?

Hats off to Grist‘s David Roberts for putting together a thought-provoking line of thinking in Why Bill Gates is wrong. And no, he’s not talking about Bing.

At the core, Roberts challenges the hubris of viewing all society’s problems through the lens of innovation.  Read More

The Strategic Role of Human Resources in the New Economy

A while back, I published a short article on the strategic role of Human Resources in the new economy.  The article: Le rôle stratégique des DRH dans les 10 ans à venir is in French, but since I get so many requests to talk about this issue, I’ve translated it here for you.  The main point I’m making is that in today’s disruptive economic climate, HR can and must become a critical differentiator.

The strategic role of Human Resources in the coming years

To generate creative added value is one of the surest ways for companies to win in the global competition today. Innovation is the new imperative. Read More