How the Science of Intuition™ can increase business relevance

By understanding the science behind intuition, businesses can channel awareness, intelligence and experience into the exact right decision at just the right time.

Intuition might seem to have little to do with business and more to do with the fast, accurate, from-the-gut responses often seen outside the corporate world. It seems to belong more to professional athletes, medical professionals, emergency responders and anyone else who’s phenomenally adept at taking just the right actions at the right time amid fast-moving, even harrowing events.

In all cases, these professionals are turning their years of expertise and training into peak performance at make-or-break moments. It’s their highly attuned pattern recognition, split-second decision-making and adaptation on-the-fly that guides their actions and decisions.

Intuition can also drive more mundane moments, like navigating a busy intersection while crossing the street. Or sometimes an answer will appear out of nowhere—and it just seems right. When that happens, it’s probably your intuition speaking.

To be human is to listen to this intuition—a highly developed and data-driven capability that is built on decades of experience and the countless data points acquired through life.

In many ways, intuition is a lot like wisdom: both are based on knowledge and insights—and deepen over time. However, while wisdom often involves thoughtful consideration, reflection and analysis, intuition is immediate. It surfaces as a hunch that can feel like absolute certainty. Or a sense about something being almost inevitable.

Industrial intuition enables businesses to anticipate and act, immediately

But intuition also has an important place in the business world, as well. Whether determining a new pricing structure or recommending a course of action for a key client, there's a lot riding on business decisions today.

For businesses, technology can now mimic the power of human intuition, allowing organizations to industrialize intuition, channeling awareness, intelligence and experience into the exact right decision.

That’s why, while intuition can seem mysterious, its benefits are too compelling to ignore. And while the Science of Intuition™ is still being explored and developed, its mechanisms are thoroughly researched and well-documented. Understanding the science behind intuition can not only improve individual decision-making—we believe it can also increase the relevance of an organization.

In this article, we’ll look at what the latest science says about how intuition works and translate those insights to the industrial level. We’ll then explore how to cultivate an intuition-like capability in your business that anticipates expectations, acts instantly and leaves competitors scrambling in its wake.

Understanding the Science of Intuition™

At some point, we've all been advised to trust our gut. It turns out the idea that intuition is linked to “a second brain” in our stomach is increasingly supported by scientific research. Studies on the biology of intuition highlight interactions between the brain’s caudate nucleus and right hippocampus, and the enteric nervous system in the digestive tract.

While it was originally believed that signals only traveled one way—from the brain to the digestive system—we now know that communication flows in both directions. This gut sense may indeed be your intuition speaking.

Just as neurons connect different parts of the body to generate intuition, various systems and processes within a modern business can harness data and software to predict and respond to shifting market conditions. Engineering intuition like this may involve system upgrades and new capabilities that make your whole operating model more efficient, more adaptable and, ultimately, more intuitive.

With the right set of intelligent and automated business processes, enabled by technology and data, you can turn your organization’s entire body of knowledge into a more sophisticated model that helps the whole business act faster and smarter in every moment.

Blend intuition with analysis for faster, more effective decision-making

Businesses often talk about data-driven decision-making. And intuition is the ultimate example of that. Intuition is an automatic process that provides instantaneous access to the vast data lakes of experience and knowledge that accumulate over time, producing immediate knowledge without the need for conscious, analytical reasoning. This unconscious intelligence is always active, capable of assessing ambiguity and quickly arriving at answers, enabling action without deliberation.

It’s even better when intuition happens alongside analytical reasoning. Like the analytical process, the intuitive process also “includes problem definition, analysis, and synthesis,” as one study says, “but these stages occur faster and are mostly non-conscious and deeply intertwined.” Most researchers acknowledge that both systems typically operate in tandem when people think, and that the most effective decision-making combines both intuition and analysis.

Business can use artificial intelligence (AI) to quite literally eliminate the gap between intuition and analysis. Prior to AI, business decisions were based on individual intuition and judgments derived from small datasets, simple calculations and a lifetime of experience. This approach was manual and, therefore, prone to bias or error.

Then came data-driven workflows, which dramatically enhanced the ability to analyze large amounts of information, expanding the aperture and drastically increasing —and sharpening—insights. While this process enhanced decision-making, it was still time-consuming.

With AI, businesses can get richer insights at a previously unheard-of speed. AI makes decision-making both intuitive and rigorously analytical. With AI-driven capabilities, businesses can optimize workflows across their operations, from supply chain management to CRM.

Fuel industrial intuition with dynamic data from real-world experience

Why is it that some intuitions can lead to incorrect conclusions, while others are remarkably accurate? Research indicates there are different types of intuition: standard and expert. While all intuition relies to some degree on knowledge and feedback acquired over a lifetime, extensive experience in a specific domain can result in sharper, more precise expert intuition.

In other words, intuition is not a static, you-have-it-or-you-don't phenomenon. Rather, it is dynamic and responsive, deepening over time and with experience.

According to Scientific American, “highly experienced individuals tend to compare patterns when making decisions. They are able to recognize regularities, repetitions and similarities between the information available to them and their past experiences. They then imagine how a given situation might play out. This combination enables them to make relevant decisions quickly and competently.”

Similarly, businesses can industrialize their intuition and increase its depth and precision over time. Using sensing technologies, particularly generative AI and IoT, businesses can harness massive amounts of data and continuously improving algorithms for self-learning processes.

Ever more responsive, accurate, always adapting and improving, a business with industrial intuition operates by a new set of rules. The customer is always right. Only now, so is your business.

An intuition-like capability at an industrial scale, super-charged by AI and other enabling technologies—constantly fed with data and immediately able to act on precise insights in the moment they occur—has no precedence in human history.

Like our individual intuition, industrial intuition enhances decision-making. And by understanding the Science of Intuition™, businesses can unlock the secret to perpetual relevance.

Contact us for more information.