Tag Archives: Intuitive Compass™

Part IV, the Work We Do & Case Studies, SQUIRCLE: The Future of Business Requires Reinvention

This is the final installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series, covering a 2020 interview of SQUIRCLE Founder Francis Cholle, conducted by Adélaïde Barbier.

If you haven’t already, visit Parts I, II, and III in this series.

In Part I, “SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for A New World,” we introduced you to the definitions and principles of our work and philosophy.

In Part II, “SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game” we explored The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.

In Part III, “SQUIRCLE: Applied to Business and Leadership” we demonstrated SQUIRCLE in action by applying our concepts and activities to business problems and real-world solutions.

In Part IV, we will dive into the work Francis has faced at the helm of The SQUIRCLE Academy, walking you through case studies and the reinvention of world-renowned businesses.

Could you walk us through the exemplary revival of Ralph Lauren Parfums?

In 2010, the American brand Ralph Lauren Parfum was in a strong decline (-25% growth). There was a great temptation to forcefully recover sales by focusing everything on commercial and promotional techniques at the risk of reducing margins and investment in product development. But the global president of the brand was able to unite his teams and consulting agencies around a radically innovative approach.

Our collaboration and the transformation of his mindset allowed him, at a critical time, to reverse his perspective on the development of a collection of four fragrances for men called Big Pony.

“Working with Francis Cholle is more than exciting. It is always very interesting and very stimulating. His approach helps reach the root cause of any business challenge and it systematically enriches any thought process with a lot of depth and rich perspectives. I only wish I had met him earlier in my career.”

— Guillaume de Lesquen, Global President Ralph Lauren Fragrances

From a purely transactional approach, he moved on to an empathetic and archetypal understanding of his customers and generated a product that met as much the needs of the time as those of the brand. Before the concept was even in the vernacular, he orchestrated the shaping of the brand’s raison d’être (reason for being) resulting in a double-digit capitalized annual growth rate (CAGR) in a single year and doubling the growth of the global market over five consecutive years.

Any other examples pulled from your practice?

Here is another direct illustration regarding a billion-dollar US media company called Hachette Media.

At a time when the media industry was upset by a plethora of new start-ups with disruptive offerings and revenue models, the CEO had to accept that he had no clarity about the future but that it shouldn’t hamper his ability to lead his direct reports, inspire his people, make decisions and take action.

One day, after an intense one-on-one session, because a lack of clear vision of the future was unsettling to him, he eventually accepted that the “vision was the reinvention.” He also admitted that despite the constant pressure of the headquarters, the culture in the US division had to change from being financially driven with quarterly reports ruling their calendars to becoming more entrepreneurial and willing to experiment and take more risks, in the absence of a clear strategy and set roadmap.

But this had to turn into a new, day-to-day reality, starting with the way his direct reports would rethink their business and adopt a new leadership mindset and behaviors. The holding had to invest in the digital transformation of their business, yet it was carrying costs that were now too high given the fact that a few important household name magazines like Metropolitan Home had to be closed for lack of advertising revenues due to a decline in readership. At the same time, Elle magazine was doing remarkably well. That same year it had sold more advertising pages than Vogue magazine, a business milestone in the history of the iconic French magazine in its US incarnation.

To help get all executive team members to agree to invest time or budget in the digital transformation of the business model was not an easy feat. The SQUIRCLE Game helped a lot. The SQUIRCLE Game acts as a harmonizer, just like an orchestra tunes their instruments to the A note that the first violin gives to all musicians. It might seem esoteric, but it works.

They practiced the SQUIRCLE Game regularly each time their Executive Committee was meeting. The SQUIRCLE Game enabled them to understand that in full uncertainty you don’t necessarily need a clear vision to reach your goal. They were able to accept the unexpected “vision as the reinvention,” even if it felt somewhat blurry to the SQUARE profiles. They saw that they didn’t need to agree on the path forward either, which appeased tensions and allowed a space for disagreement without brutal confrontation.

At the same time, they experienced firsthand that it required a different type of leadership (more receptive and less opinionated, which is hard when dealing with a burning platform) and a different type of navigation: day by day evaluation, moment to moment vigilance, overall acceptance that not having the upper hand was not a problem in and of itself but do not accept this uncertainty was either paralyzing or leading to willful force, which of course without fail produces misjudgments and exhaustion. This new approach to business trickled down throughout the organization. It triggered a sense of possibility and calculated risk.

The company won 6th place on the App Store for a media digital solution invented in-house that people could download on their phone. The company regained profitability in less than a year. Soon after it was sold to Hearst as part of a global sale of all media activities decided by the shareholder and global CEO.

“The Intuitive Compass® is not just a concept, it works! I had a first-hand experience working with Francis, and his methodology is both fun and effective. He has decoded the new meaning of success for individuals and organizations in the new economy. Anyone looking to reinvent legacy business models through creative and sustainable innovation should work with him and his model.”

— Philippe Guelton, EVP, COO, Hachette Media US

Two years later we got rehired by the former CEO of Hachette Media US who took on Lagardère Sports and Entertainment, EMEA. Due to digital channels, that division was also heavily disrupted. The financial state of the business was even steeper. The organization was also more complex due to multiple countries, sports, and business models. Nevertheless, we got the same results.

In less than a year, the business turned around with profitability, business growth, and financial risk brought back to green.

In a COVID and post COVID world, how do we regain nature and make it central to our lives?

This is the fundamental objective of SQUIRCLE: to reconnect us — through intuition and instinct — with the intelligence of nature in us.

McKinsey Global Institute conducted extensive research about innovation. It showed that when pursuing innovation the focus should be equally — if not more — on people and culture as we process and structure.

Once professionals and individuals use a SQUIRCLE mindset to fluently tap into their natural abilities for complex problem solving and decision making in uncertainty, we will have made substantial progress.

One decision at a time, we will surely move towards a more innovative and more sustainable future.

Did you start the SQUIRCLE ACADEMY to reach a wider audience?

In addition to my SQUIRCLE book, I have launched The SQUIRCLE ACADEMY. Its purpose is to bring to as many companies as possible the same principles and techniques that The Human Company brings in our management consulting assignments to help some of the most successful global companies transform and thrive in disruption.

At SQUIRCLEACADEMY.com executives, managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals can access:

  • Original outcome-based e-learning courses
  • Off-the-shelf workshops facilitated by our certified coaches to boost communication, collaboration, adaptation, and innovation
  • Training programs (customized with and for their specific needs)
  • Certification track to become a SQUIRCLE coach in their own company, or as independent agents working for our various clients or their clients.

I believe in the power of a purpose-driven community — everyone aspiring to a shared vision, making a difference in the world, upholding principles that maintain the integrity of it all, and moving us forward. This is why this certification program is one of our priorities at The SQUIRCLE ACADEMY.

Moved by the same spirit, we also created the KNOW BETTER WORLD FOUNDATION, targeting more specifically women, who still have to overcome in so many ways the invisible barriers.

Is there one last thing you would like to share?

During my 15-year practice, as I mentioned earlier, we have trained and worked with about 250,000 business students and executives. We’ve heard from many that it changed them beyond their professional life. I sincerely hope that we will be able to affect many more people with SQUIRCLE.

Organizations can reinvent themselves.

I’ve seen this happen even with large global businesses in free fall, due to broken business models, disrupted industries, and very tough economic environments.

To make this possible, the work has to start at the top but then quickly this new way of thinking needs to cascade through the ranks to make the transformation process possible, efficient, and durable. That’s essentially the raison d’être (reason for being) of SQUIRCLE.

Part III, the Application, SQUIRCLE: Applied to Business and Leadership

This is the third installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series, a 2020 interview of SQUIRCLE Founder Francis Cholle, conducted by Adélaïde Barbier.

If you haven’t already, visit Parts I and II of this series.

In Part I, “SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for A New World,” we introduced you to the definitions and principles of our work and philosophy.

In Part II, “SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game” we explored The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.

In Part III, we will demonstrate SQUIRCLE in action by applying our methodology and activities to real-world business problems.

Why is SQUIRCLE so essential for businesses?

Using a game and letting go of strategy and outcomes remains a very foreign concept among business audiences. But it shows that when people give up the traditional agenda of willful linear efficiency when they stop resisting confusion and chaos, they start being much more receptive to their environment. They connect with a new part of themselves and can far more easily adapt to change.

This is exactly why I designed SQUIRCLE. The model shows an actionable path for people to give up the dominance of the SQUARE over the CIRCLE because it compromises our ability to thrive in a VUCA world. When we relinquish control over the process by letting go of strategy and outcomes, a deeper intelligence emerges at an individual and group level, thereby making actionable solutions clear. This deeper intelligence, called intuitive intelligence, guides the group of participants through the complexity of the challenge to its resolution.

[1] The National Institute for Play is a non-profit public benefit corporation committed to bringing the unrealized knowledge, practices, and benefits of play into public life. It was founded and is led today by Dr. Stuart Brown, who trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry, and clinical research.

[2] You can find related data on SQUIRCLEACADEMY.com

[3] For more details, check out the work of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin which research led to the scientific publication “Heuristics, The Foundation of Adaptive Behaviors” (Oxford University Press, 2011)

What are the difficulties you observe in companies nowadays and how do you intervene?

For companies to be successful in a VUCA world, they need a culture of intrapreneurship where intuitive intelligence is key to successfully experiment; just like research scientists who operate in their lab at the frontier of what they know for sure works and what they assume could work. This assumption cannot be formulated shrewdly without some level of intuitiveness. In his biography, Steve Jobs insisted on the power of intuition and described its impact on his work at the helm of Apple. “Intuition is a very powerful thing,” he told writer Walter Isaacson, “more powerful than intellect.” One of France’s most significant mathematicians and philosophers of science, Henri Poincaré said, “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.“

When the SQUARE (logic) becomes dominant it belittles the CIRCLE (intuition) and deprives us of essential adaptive and problem-solving skills.

This is probably one of our biggest cognitive biases, yet I rarely see it discussed in the workplace.

This bias sits at the core of my advisory work with CEOs. I meet strong, driven leaders with exceptional analytical skills, strategic capacities, and often clear intuitive abilities. Yet in their organizations, complex problems and team collaboration are approached in a SQUARE dominant way more often than not. Once a CEO recognizes this and its side effects on their business, their mindset shifts, and in turn, this impacts their organizations. This is the decisive factor that allowed billion-dollar companies to succeed at reinventing themselves and overcome daunting business challenges when recommendations of even the best strategic management consulting firms had not been enough to bring forth the level of transformation needed by our clients.

Becoming aware of the dominance of the SQUARE is the pivotal process that naturally unleashes an untapped innate potential in everyone. That is key to adapting and thriving in disruption. That is key to understanding more deeply post COVID consumers whose choices are shifting towards purposeful dollar spend and engaging employees whose preferred places to work are more and more corporations that operate responsibly.

Can you give us an example of a company operating from a “free CIRCLE” perspective? What does it look like?

I remember interviewing a senior executive at one of the largest global pharmaceutical companies. He was running the portfolio of all over-the-counter drugs. Because it was the least strategic and least profitable part of the company’s portfolio, his bosses were not paying much attention to his way of driving the business. So he and his team felt certain independence and developed real autonomy. Unlike the rest of the offices, they painted theirs in bright colors, had a new logo designed, worked different flexible hours to accommodate all personal situations. They spontaneously created a new work culture.

Over four consecutive years, they grew their top line by 40% although the global president admitted that they had repeatedly made mistakes in elaborating their strategy. Yet what made them successful was their ability to systematically pivot quickly. The pressure they felt coming from the C-suite was low, they became rather autonomous thinkers and created their own culture. That’s how the global president explained their success despite the repeated strategic misjudgments.

This speaks to Peter Drucker’s famous conviction that “culture eats strategy at breakfast.” In my 15 years of management consulting, I have repeatedly seen culture save groups or on the contrary dangerously compromise success.

So, if culture is key to the success of a company in an unstable environment, how do you change it? How do you concretely help organizations transform themselves and gain agility?

Over the years, I have worked with several companies that had to reinvent their business models due to disruption by pure digital players, in industries like sports and entertainment or media, for instance. In my experience, it is rarely wise to try to change the culture of an organization head-on, but there are ways to influence it.

To do so, our approach is very pragmatic. The work starts with a proprietary assessment that I developed. It evaluates how an individual, a team, or a whole organization is positioned to deliver on their strategy and reach their goals, as well as innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment of unknown and uncertainty.

In the same vein as the seminal work of MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Edgar Schein on Culture and Leadership, our assessment analyzes the way executives make decisions through seventeen parameters. The outcome enables people to focus on their strengths and be wary of their blind spots, the shadow side of their strengths. It makes diversity actionable and encourages organizations to value outliers, leverage untapped resources, and seize overlooked opportunities in their work culture. It awakens an innate human potential — deep human thinking — that looks at problems with a renewed perspective that doesn’t shy away from complexity.

When we avoid complexity, we oversimplify.

Sometimes it is necessary but at best this leads to incremental change and more often than not to the status quo. It is only when we embrace the complexity that we can access the deeper solutions needed to address the challenges of today’s disruptive environment.

We designed a workshop for complex problem solving where participants are not afraid of getting lost in the process. Actually, after experiencing the SQUIRCLE Game they know in their hearts and minds that losing sight of any logical understanding of a situation is a sure sign of getting closer to a breakthrough idea. Eventually, they look forward to that critical moment. By then you know you’re on a path to cultural evolution.

You mentioned an assessment you developed and use, can you give more info about it?

The SQUIRCLE test is based on a proven assessment I invented — The Intuitive Compass® — that helped 250,000 senior executives and students at some of the most successful companies and most prestigious business schools in the world. It gives respondents insights into their thinking preference for either a SQUARE, a CIRCLE, or an EVEN approach to situations and decisions.

The purpose of the SQUIRCLE test is not to assign you to a specific profile or category. It is meant to foster self-reflection and promote open discussion with others. Whether your preference is for a SQUARE or a CIRCLE approach, we all need to recognize:

  • The importance of CIRCLE in re-inventing our organizations, our modes of leadership, and decision-making.
  • The great contribution of SQUARE in analyzing, bringing facts and frameworks of reference, as long as it doesn’t become dominant, like an ideology that suppresses critical and creative thinking.

Based on a decade of empirical observations, we can say that a large majority of people favor a SQUARE approach. So it makes a big difference once people recognize their inclination and can better appreciate others’ differences or similarities. It’s not how many CIRCLE people you have in your organization that matters. It is how well you understand and support those with a CIRCLE preference.

SQUIRCLE is really for everyone.

In Part IV, “SQUIRCLE: The Future of Business Requires Reinvention,” we will dive into the work Francis has faced at the helm of The SQUIRCLE Academy, walking you through case studies and the reinvention of world-renowned businesses.

Part II, the Process, SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game

This is the second installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series, a 2020 interview of SQUIRCLE Founder Francis Cholle, conducted by Adélaïde Barbier.

If you haven’t already, visit Part I of this series.

In Part I, “SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for A New World,” we introduced you to the definitions and principles of our work and philosophy.

In Part II, we will explore The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.

How do you implement this methodology inside the companies with which you work?

Companies facing a complex problem often fail to solve it with conventional tools. In such cases, leaders need to change their mindset and approach their way of doing business with a new way of being (“façon d’être”). That’s when using SQUIRCLE is game-changing.

Here, it is useful to distinguish between “complication” and “complexity.” In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux explains it very well through two examples.

First, he talks about a Boeing aircraft, which he describes as a complicated system; although there are tens of thousands of components to it, they come together following a linear logic. If you were to pull out any single piece and give it to an engineer,, they would be able to tell you whether the missing piece has an impact on the functioning of the aircraft, and if yes, which one.

Second, Laloux gives the example of a plate of spaghetti as a complex system. It contains only a dozen ingredients, but if you pull on a single noodle, no computer — not even the most powerful one in the world — will be able to predict exactly what will happen.

What companies face in our VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world is a ceaseless succession of complex problems and they need to develop a new skill set to adapt and succeed. And maybe this will sound strange, but it all starts with the SQUIRCLE game, a “serious game.”

A serious game? You start your business practice with a game. Why?

To get to the mindset of letting go and allowing a new form of intelligence to emerge (the CIRCLE), being playful is essential.

As Einstein would say, “Play is the highest form of research.”

Play is magical and profound. It’s essential to our growth and development when we are children but it’s also a key factor in creativity and agility in the workplace. I have used play to help people be more creative, deal with emotions and regain enthusiasm when their company was going through difficult times.

I propose a game that demonstrates through experience our innate ability to adapt and solve complex problems. This game makes it possible to reach a state of “flow.” In other words, a state in which one disconnects from the conscious by the simple pleasure of being in the moment. From then on emerges a form of rhythm shared by all.

Neuroscience has proven that play connects us with the deeper layers of our brain that are only accessible in this way, or even through meditation, sleep, and dreams, or psychotropic drugs. Even if the game requires some logical thinking, it allows us to realize the power of undoing the dominance of rational thinking. When we play, we are less in “self-control.” We are more open, more inspired, and more willing to take risks.

“I wasn’t working, I was playing. I was letting things take shape before my eyes, and deep down I knew I was about to find something that was going to be Nobel Prize-winning… and that’s what happened.”

–– Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The National Institute for Play defines play as “a state of being that is intensely pleasurable. It energizes and enlivens us. It eases our burdens, renews a natural sense of optimism, and opens us up to new possibilities. (…) Scientists — neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists… — have recently begun viewing play as a profound biological process.”

What is the SQUIRCLE game? And what is its purpose?

The SQUIRCLE Game (described in Chapter 6 of the SQUIRCLE book) mirrors very faithfully what business is about today. The objective of the game is to help executives develop a new skill set to adapt and succeed in a VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) environment.

In a few words, during the SQUIRCLE Game, a group of people recites the alphabet. But not just in any way. The group must recreate the alphabet, from A to Z, with their eyes closed, one letter at a time, following the alphabetic order, but with random participation from each member of the group. Participants do not have the right to agree on a prior roadmap. No one knows who is going to speak. If two people speak at the same time or if the usual order of the alphabet is not respected, it is necessary to start again from the beginning.

The group is thus faced with a complex situation, for which there is no preconceived solution and no possible intellectual strategy. A logical mind is not able to resolve this situation. And at the same time, the members of the group must keep their logic since it is necessary to respect the order of the alphabet, but show instinct to adapt. It is a way of recreating a time and a space in which people function by being connected universally, without worrying about differences of opinion or emotions, to achieve a form of unanimity.

The objective is to demonstrate to the participants that in the face of complexity we must not necessarily go through operating modes. Strategic, logical thinking is not only not enough, but allowing it to dominate bans us from having access to our natural capacity for solving complex problems.

Simply put, regardless of their backgrounds, when SQUIRCLE Game participants give up the urge to win, they get in touch with their intuition and tune into more subtle perceptions necessary for creative adaptation. Paradoxically, they win the game.

You deployed this “game” in several companies with teams that I imagine had never been exposed to this form of their own intelligence before. What is the success rate of this game experiment?

Without exception, the group ends up getting there. I have facilitated the SQUIRCLE Game in hundreds of groups across five continents, a variety of industries and sizes of companies, non-profit organizations, conferences with mixed audiences, graduate programs, and high schools. I have never seen participants not able to eventually complete the game successfully.

Out of all the groups with which I have worked, only one so far was able to complete the SQUIRCLE Game in one go the very first time they tried. It was in Tokyo. All participants were Japanese. Eager to understand, in the end, I asked participants how they felt during the game and how they explained their success.

Two factors emerged: social discretion is paramount in Japanese society, and it is best demonstrated through silence. Japanese people value silence highly as a fundamental form of nonverbal communication and associate it with truthfulness. For them, even more than language, silence conveys information, emotions, and rich and ambiguous subtleties, which in turn forces attentive listening and makes space for another type of interpersonal communication. In my many years of doing business in Japan, I often had meetings where the CEO would listen quietly while his team members talked about the details of a transaction or even things unrelated to business.

In the West, it’s usually the opposite: the lower you are in the hierarchy, the less you are expected to talk in meetings, and for the sake of efficiency, small talk is rather limited because we value the intellect over the senses.

What the SQUIRCLE Game makes explicit in less than 20 minutes is the following. For the human mind to overcome a complex challenge like this serious game, thinking linearly is not operative. The act of exhaustively mapping out all scenarios, comparing them, and choosing the optimum path simply is not possible. The context changes constantly and depends on multiple people who all act interdependently. And even if it were possible, it would require computing too much data at once. As a point of reference, computers had to study 30 million scenarios to win over world champions of Go Game, which involves only two players. But the more important point here is that this is not how the human mind works in complex situations. When time is limited, information is unreliable, and the future is uncertain, our minds use a heuristic to adapt to circumstances, make decisions and solve problems.

Can you detail what you mean by “heuristics”?

In contrast to logic and probability, heuristics are processes that partially ignore information and enable fast decisions. The classical idea about heuristic is two-fold:

I) Because of their cognitive limitations, humans are unable to perform rational computation.

II) When people can optimize, they often rely on heuristics to save effort at the price of sacrificing accuracy.

This translates into the idea that the less information, computation, or time that one uses, the less accurate one’s judgments will be. This accuracy-effort trade-off is believed to be one of the few general laws of the mind.

However, their in-depth research concludes quite differently from this classical view. Their results show that less effort can lead to better or worse accuracy, depending on the environment in which a heuristic is used. In a simple well-defined microcosm, in which all relevant alternatives, consequences, and probability distribution are known, and no surprises are allowed, computation and optimization models work. But in an uncertain world, heuristics can be more accurate than methods that use more information and computation, including optimization methods.

Attempting secured deduction through fact gathering and computing is not only ineffective in the SQUIRCLE Game, but it is also disabling participants from fully accessing a deeper intelligence. By definition, the logical mind tends to exclude anything ambiguous by nature based on the binary measuring system with which it works (true or false, higher or lower, thicker or thinner, etc.). In doing so, it shuts down our capacity for noticing non-binary information and all subtleties that come with it. To illustrate this point, what comes to mind are classical computers and quantum computers. The first group manipulates ones and zeroes to crunch through operations, but quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits. Just like classical computers, quantum computers use ones and zeros, but qubits have a third state called “superposition” that allows them to represent a one or a zero at the same time. If you stick to classical machine computation you ban superposition and other quantum mechanical phenomena like entanglement.

On the other hand, in the SQUIRCLE Game, once participants give up a domineering command control mode and shift away from binary thinking, they immediately regain access to their natural ability for creative adaptation.

Is there some scientific research available on this topic?

I have not conducted a scientific experiment to observe what’s happening in the brains of participants although I seriously thought of it, it is too costly given the exorbitant price of this type of brain imagery equipment. However, in Chapter 6 of my SQUIRCLE book, I mention the research of neuroscientists Alejandro Perez and Manuel Carreiras published in 2013. They showed the spontaneous neuronal synchronization that occurs between brains when people who had never met before, engage in a conversation. They explained that this natural interbrain communion happens beyond language.

All the more interested in this research, I found out that eventually all groups systematically succeed at the SQUIRCLE Game once they have been advised to — individually and collectively — surrender control over the process and give up their attachment to the outcomes.

This is exactly what happened to Philipp, the Unilever executive and experienced marathon runner that I mention in Chapter 1 of my SQUIRCLE book. Philipp accepted to follow his coach who advised him to let go of his goal and focus on the process. He never looked at his watch and observed his breathing throughout the entire race. He reached his best time ever although he had trained the least for that race.

In Part III, “SQUIRCLE: Applied to Business and Leadership” we will demonstrate SQUIRCLE in action by applying our methodology and activities to real-world business problems.

Part I, the Model, SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for a New World

Interview by Adélaïde Barbier, September 2020

Francis Cholle, you are an international business consultant and best-selling author. Your signature is helping companies adapt, innovate and succeed in a rather unconventional way.

You have spent the past 15 years advising C-suite leadership around the globe — across various industries and companies of all sizes — on how to implement your high-performing methodology to revolutionize their business performance. This methodology was developed through science and practice and explained in the three books you’ve published.

I’ve seen you in action and can attest to how you question traditional thinking and offer the world a pragmatic model to see business in a radical and fresh new light. Yet it all happens naturally, with ease and empathy. I’m delighted that you would share your knowledge, experience, and techniques here.

You just published a book called SQUIRCLE. What is SQUIRCLE?

SQUIRCLE is a science-based model designed to enhance the way we think. In a more and more complex world, we need to rely on a deeper intelligence to make good decisions. SQUIRCLE recognizes the importance of our rational minds (SQUARE) while honoring the natural insights from our intuition (CIRCLE). Understanding how to enable synergy between both leads to a life-changing mindset that will create success with teams, clients’ problem solving, or complex decision making. It is designed for business and all aspects of life.

10 years ago, you wrote The Intuitive Compass. What is the link to SQUIRCLE?

The Intuitive Compass® is a model I developed offering a new business method for executive decision-making. Proven to be very efficient with top management and resulting in consistently striking results, I now want to offer a new, simplified, and easily actionable version of this framework for their teams and beyond. SQUIRCLE is a scalable model that can have a wider use among businesses but also outside, in schools, and even at home. That’s also why I created SQUIRCLE ACADEMY. My vision was to create a community of users who can access all the resources they need to start their SQUIRCLE journey. I still use the Intuitive Compass model in my practice with businesses to advise CEOs and their executive teams to help rebalance their relationship to reason and instinct in their decision-making processes.

For us to understand SQUIRCLE better, would you mind defining reason and instinct?

Reason is our ability to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic, based on deduction and induction. Instinct is understood as the innate ability to adapt and stay alive. Intuitive Intelligence is defined as the synergy between reason and instinct, made possible by intuition which bridges the two.

Intuition is the ability to notice and understand information that our logical mind cannot access or make sense of because this information is not explicit. Intuition is like a search engine that goes beneath and beyond where the logical mind operates. It is a cognitive process that not only captures unusual signals but can also understand some of them immediately without conscious reasoning. Gut feelings are considered here as the outcome of this intuitive cognitive process.

When reason becomes dominant, it destroys intuition to the point of depriving us of our essential instinctive skills of adaptation, invention, and complex problem-solving (visualize a CIRCLE trapped in a SQUARE).

Today, from our education system to our work environment, it is clear that rational logic dominates our ways of thinking. This is probably one of our biggest cognitive biases; however, I rarely see it mentioned in business and managerial literature.

This is why I created the SQUIRCLE™ (SQUARE + CIRCLE) model. It allows us to overcome this false opposition between reason and instinct, and therefore free the CIRCLE (instinct and intuition) of the confinement of the SQUARE (reason).

Since we live in a very rational world, does this mean we are all SQUARE?

The answer to your question is no. We are not all SQUARE. The proportion of people with a SQUARE thinking preference compared to CIRCLE preference varies from 80% Square/20% Circle to 66%/34% based on our SQUIRCLE test statistics, which are relatively recent but also based on a previous proprietary assignment we still use today and another pre-existing assignment that has been in existence over decades and used by millions of respondents and that look at similar psychometrics.

What attributes do you assign to the SQUARE versus the CIRCLE?

We are all educated to develop a SQUARE approach to life. That is, to think logically and rely on rationality and facts to make good decisions. But there is more to us than what can be understood through logic. Emotions, inspirations, intuitions, and sensations all live beyond logic. These not only make us uniquely human, but they enable our creativity and agility and directly connect us to our bodies as well as to nature within us.

SQUARE symbolizes the logical mind: deduction and induction, information and evaluation. It is rational, dependable, stable, predictable, and orderly. But it is limiting. This is why we have arts to stimulate our imagination, sports to engage our bodies, and games to encourage learning and risk-taking. Our feelings and hunches help us engage with the ambiguity and complexity of life. They provide the necessary level of subtlety to go beyond binary logic, to think deeply. Noble Prize in physics Niels Bohr’s famous quote illustrates this point perfectly: “No, no. You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.”

CIRCLE symbolizes instinct and intuition: emergence, fluidity, and unpredictability. It is non-linear, inclusive, and adaptive. Like nature, it is complex and creative, holistic and infinite. This is why CIRCLE is so important in a time of increasing uncertainty and so necessary to shift from our exploitative relationship with nature to adopting a regenerative model. This is what every company has to integrate into its management culture (disruption) and business practices (CSR).

If the CIRCLE is natural — the nature within us — why have we lost the connection to the CIRCLE in our lives?

We have alienated the CIRCLE in our lives by misjudging science. As Dr. Matthias Stelzner, chair of the Surgery Department at the University of California at Los Angeles/VA, shared with me after reading SQUIRCLE, “We have progressively assigned science a role that it never claimed: to give us certitudes. The purpose of science is to produce knowledge.”

It remains our responsibility to decide what to do with this knowledge. But it is so much more comfortable to implicitly believe that what’s rational is right and what’s not rational wrong. That allows us to shy away from responsibilities and gives us the illusion of control over life’s and nature’s unpredictability.

The good news, though, is that this centuries-old bias is at odds with the latest scientific research, led by renowned scientists like Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, or Director of the Center of Brain and Creativity at the University of Southern California and neuroscientist, Dr. António Damásio.

Dr. Gigerenzer researched the importance of heuristics for reliable decision-making and better adaptation in an uncertain environment, while the work of Dr. Damásio explored the importance of emotions in our capacity to anticipate and perceive decisive nuances in complex situations.

How do we access our intuitive intelligence? How do we free the CIRCLE?

First, let’s remember CIRCLE (intuition) is always on. If it’s not “freed” it’s because we simply don’t pay attention to it. Few do. Why? Because faithful to a dominant SQUARE, most of us still expect intuition to tell us what’s right from what’s wrong. I keep reading article titles in respectable trade magazines such as, “Should you follow your intuition?” and “When to trust your intuition?” This is not the function of intuition to tell us what to do unless we connect with a gut instinct in a situation of emergency. Intuition is more like a search engine that reaches places where logic cannot go. It brings back clues that enrich our perspectives and that don’t necessarily make sense, but it doesn’t mean that these clues are void of value. Therein lies our responsibility to decide what to do with this non-logical information.

“Freeing” the CIRCLE simply requires becoming aware of our bias for a dominant SQUARE to purposefully undo it, so that you can become receptive of your intuitive sense.

Can you give us examples of practice to learn how to “free” our CIRCLE?

There are ways to do this. They are really simple but not always easy to execute. It takes a lot of practice and letting go. Let’s take the example of mountain climbing. Business schools like Wharton bring their students into mountaineering expeditions. It provides an environment where you have to make reasonable decisions in a very emotional context, and mitigate performance optimization and risk management.

Reaching peak performance requires hyper-focus and physical relaxation, all at once.

You operate in a place where the unexpected can happen at any given moment. At a sensory level, you need to be very alert to pick up subtle cues from the changes in the mountain wall, the temperature, and the weather or your equipment. Breathing is an essential tool to stay in the moment and avoid any potentially fatal distraction. (There is a whole science to the art of breathing. You can find useful book references on SQUIRCLEACADEMY.com under “Science” in the menu.)

Similarly, the most important and most difficult pose in yoga is Shavasana or corpse pause.

It is the time when your neurovegetative system can integrate all the stimuli and adjustments accumulated through the class. You reap the fruit of all your efforts. But to be most efficient, you have to do nothing. Absolutely nothing, like a motionless dead body. Hence the name of this yoga pause, when being most passive means the highest return (health) on investment (your time and effort).

At work, in the office, or at home, you can take a few minutes to pay attention to the movements of your diaphragm and practice cardiac coherence advocated by the French physician, neuroscientist, author, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. David Servan-Schreiber. It consists of inhaling for five seconds, then exhaling for the same amount of time (for a 10-second respiratory cycle).

Biofeedback devices make it possible to observe on-screen how this deep, regular breathing slows and stabilizes the heartbeat. This way we can reduce stress, improve concentration, and enhance creativity and productivity while spending less energy. Athletes have been using this method for decades and the greatest American universities have been researching and implementing it in their curriculum (MIT created a dedicated chair called the Presencing Institute and delivers a worldwide online class using these principles). But for this to work, it is critical to let go of any strategy and outcome.

Let go? What do you mean exactly?

A sports medicine doctor who worked with France’s boxing national team for 4 years and Tour de France cyclists for 12 years, Jean-Jacques Menuet, writes in his professional blog, “Letting go is to relieve psychological tensions and stress that pollute pleasure but also performance. This problem concerns the athlete, but also the executive in a company.” And to add, “We have everything to gain from working on this notion of “letting go”; more pleasure, more performance, better management of emotions and, above all, more intuition. That is to say that the best tactics, the best choice (…), the better strategy will be put in place without control, rather thanks to the “unconscious mind” than to the “conscious mind.”

Menuet goes on to explain that in cycling, a sprinter who trusts everything that his computer memory has accumulated as information will be able to make decisions spontaneously rather than self-consciously staying focused on the information displayed on the computer screen. “When this happens, it feels like magic!” wrote Menuet. The reason it feels like magic is because it eludes our logical minds. This added performance is the outcome of a complex process that we don’t need to fully understand to fully engage. To do this, we rely on a non-explicit intelligence that operates differently than logic and is only accessible when we let go of mental control.

This is the first installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series.

In Part II, “SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game” we will explore The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.

How to Evaluate Any Corporate Culture

corporate cultureFor those of you who missed our post last week, we used the Intuitive Compass® to create a Corporate Culture Questionnaire that is suitable for both CEOs trying to get a clearer understanding of how their company culture supports performance and for people in the process of looking for a new job who want to evaluate how well they would fit within the corporate culture of a particular company.  (For those of you that need a primer on the Intuitive Compass, please click here.)

As promised, below is the decoding section for the quiz.  You should have a score between 1 and 5 for each of the four quadrants of the Intuitive Compass: northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest.

Northeast

The northeast quadrant highlights the administrative function.  It shows how business is managed and organized.  This is obviously an important aspect of business:  how can an organization function well when processes are not well managed or are simply absent?  Typically, a financial institution or accounting firm would score high in the northeast quadrant, whereas a startup may not be focusing on how to manage a business that is still being shaped.  Therefore the important facts here are the nature and maturity of the business.  Businesses with analytical functions at their core tend to score high in the northeast quadrant simply because organizational skills are in their DNA.  Mature business tend to score high in the northeast quadrant because over time it becomes highly likely that systems and procedures have been put in place to ensure smooth operations that support continuation of the status quo.  If a business is still young (less than 2 years old) it is naturally more adaptable; its culture is affected by the nature of the activity but can be influenced more easily because day-to-day activities are less ingrained with habits built over time.  It is also important to evaluate the northeast in relationship to other quadrants; a low score in the northeast can sometimes be of lesser importance in a very high-performing culture (indicated by a high score in the southeast) or temporarily out of balance because the company is going through a major phase of reinvention of its business model, which brings more focus on the southwest and northwest.

Southeast

In the southeast quadrant, we have insights into the focus on performance and the measure of performance.  A high score would be typical at a sales organization like a network marketing company.  A low score would typically be found in a company focused on administration.  This quadrant gives you insight into the level of emphasis that is given to results.  If you are talented at working with metric objectives, regardless of your function in the company (marketing or sales), you will probably be inclined to seek a company with a high score in the southeast, like a sales oriented company.  Conversely, if metrics are not your strength of interest, a company with a predominantly southeast culture is unlikely to make you happy or leverage your most valuable talents.  In this case you may look for a company that is more about creation (southwest) and/ or administration (northeast).  Again, the relationship with the other quadrants is key, especially the northwest and southwest quadrants.  I know of highly profitable large consulting firms that have no sales objectives and no ongoing measure of their commercial performance: however, because they are very strong in the northwest (strategic planning), they deliver great ideas, and phone calls from new clients continue to come in.

Northwest

In the northwest quadrant we gather information on creative thinking and strategic planning.  A higher score is always better, because as we saw earlier, research shows that openness to new ideas is a factor of longevity. However, a business may be extremely successful a few years in a row simply due to a series of great deals (southeast) and bold moves (southwest), without much strategic thinking involved.  I’ve observed that a number of large companies tend to focus more on feeding the pipeline or following the “business as usual” routine strategy to meet sales objectives (southeast).  Often companies focus on market opportunities to boost sales, with little thought about sustainable value creation, which leads them to not adapt their business model to today’s new market constraints and their marketing strategies to a new type of consumer; a dangerous path in the long run.  So it is important to look closely at a northwest score and compare it with the score in the southeast.

Southwest

The southwest quadrant shows how much a company is dedicated to R&D and creation.  This quadrant is crucial in the new economy.  A high score in the southwest quadrant indicates a buoyant culture that can generate new ideas and creative initiatives and can support an entrepreneurial spirit.  What can be problematic, though is a high score in southwest and low scores in the other three quadrants, as it would indicate a company where leadership and management are not well rounded and business functions are not well integrated.  CEOs evaluating their own company should strive for a balance whereby creativity is supported from the perspective of both allowing and funding such activities as well as supporting the marketability of the innovations that are generated by developing strengths in the other three quadrants.  Individuals evaluating the possibility of joining a particular company should also look for evidence of this balance.

From these results a number of conclusions can be drawn.

If you’re looking for a job, it is important to review the relationship between the culture of the company you are considering joining and your own Intuitive Compass® to determine whether it is a compatible match.  For instance, if you are more of a southwest type of professional, you should really consider whether you’re being offered a position in a company that displays a northeast culture, and vice versa.  These results are also insightful if you’re simply evaluating whether or not you should stay in the company you work for.  I have a client, a C-level executive who realized that he would enjoy the southwest culture of a start-up much more than he did the very northeast/southeast culture of the multinational he had been working for since the beginning of his career.  He finally decided to leave his job to create his own start-up: a consulting firm with a built-in incubator to launch new digital companies in the new media industry.

If you’re the CEO of a company and would like to improve the culture of your organization, analyzing the Intuitive Compass in relation to the culture of your company will lead you to identify areas for improvement in every quadrant where a score is low.  You need to put the profile of your Intuitive Compass in perspective with your objectives and also your context at the time of the review:  industry, market situation, mission of the company, corporate strategy.  Each quadrant with a low score or any imbalance between the four quadrants represents an opportunity for growth.  In addition, the Intuitive Compass can help you clarify and articulate to your teams the reason behind the new goals you may set for them.

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.

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 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

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

Listening for Clues to The New Economy

In 2003, when the Indian auto giant Tata Motors decided to design a new low cost car, the Nano, for lower income consumers they made a key decision: rather than starting from a traditional four wheel car and stripping it down, they would start with an auto-rickshaw (a small, three wheeled vehicle) and build it up. Also, rather than making design assumptions based on decades of auto development for the middle and upper classes, their design team researched the features their new lower income target audience – many of whom had never owned a car before – would value. One of the interesting things they discovered in their research was that their new target audience didn’t care about having a radio; they preferred having extra storage space. At this point in the evolution of car engineering and design, a radio is seen as the most basic of equipment. It’s not terribly expensive, but in the context of trying to make the lowest cost vehicle possible, it could be eliminated and simultaneously transformed into something more valuable to the target consumer: space. Read More