Integrating Reason and Intuition

INTEGRATING REASON AND INTUITION

According to an ancient Sufi story, a blind man wandering lost in a forest tripped and fell. As the blind man rummaged about the forest floor he discovered that he had fallen over a cripple. The blind man and the cripple struck up a conversation, commiserating on their fate. The blind man said, “I have been wandering in this forest for as long as I can remember, and I cannot see to find my way out.” The cripple said, “I have been lying on the forest floor for as long as I can remember, and I cannot get up to walk out.” As they sat there talking, suddenly the cripple cried out. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You hoist me up onto your shoulders and I will tell you where to walk. Together we can find our way out of the forest.” According to the ancient storyteller, the blind man symbolized rationality. The cripple symbolized intuition. We will not find our way out of the forest until we learn how to integrate the two.

Senge points to studies of experienced managers and leaders who rely on intuition as well as deliberate analysis. They rely on hunches, recognize patterns, and draw intuitive analogies and parallels to other seemingly disparate situations.19 There are even courses in management schools on intuition and creative problem solving. But we have a very long way to go, in our organizations and in society, toward reintegrating intuition and rationality.

People with high levels of personal mastery do not set out to integrate reason and intuition. Rather, they achieve it naturally—as a by-product of their commitment to use all resources at their disposal. They cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.

Bilateralism is a design principle underlying the evolution of advanced organisms. Nature seems to have learned to design in pairs; it not only builds in redundancy but achieves capabilities not possible otherwise. Two legs are critical for rapid, flexible locomotion. Two arms and hands are vital for climbing, lifting, and manipulating objects. Two eyes give us stereoscopic vision, and along with two ears, depth perception. Is it not possible that, following the same design principle, reason and intuition are designed to work in harmony for us to achieve our potential intelligence?

Systems thinking may hold a key to integrating reason and intuition. By linear thinking, Senge means a focus on causes and effects close together in time and space. Some intuitions about delayed effects or feedback loops are difficult to explain in those terms.

Very often, experienced managers have rich intuitions about complex systems, which they cannot explain. Their intuitions tell them that cause and effect are not close in time and space, that obvious solutions will produce more harm than good, and that short-term fixes produce long-term problems. But they cannot explain their ideas in simple linear cause-effect language. They end up saying, “Just do it this way. It will work.”

For example, many managers sense the dangers of eroding goals or standards but cannot fully explain how they create a reinforcing tendency to underinvest and a self-fulfilling prophecy of underrealized market growth. Or, managers may feel that they are focusing on tangible, easily measured indicators of performance and masking deeper problems, and even exacerbating these problems. But they cannot explain convincingly why these are the wrong performance indicators or how alternatives might produce improved results. Both of these intuitions can be explained when the underlying systemic structures are understood.

The conflict between intuition and linear, nonsystemic thinking has planted the seed that rationality itself is opposed to intuition. This view is demonstrably false if we consider the synergy of reason and intuition that characterizes virtually all great thinkers. Einstein said, “I never discovered anything with my rational mind.” He once described how he discovered the principle of relativity by imagining himself traveling on a light beam. Yet, he could also take brilliant intuitions and convert them into succinct, rationally testable propositions.

As managers gain facility with systems thinking as an alternative language, they find that many of their intuitions become explicable. Eventually, reintegrating reason and intuition may prove to be one of the primary contributions of systems thinking.