Learning to Build Intuitive Organizations

As changes in global business continue to escalate, the time is right to start developing the kind of organization that can best adapt and thrive into the future. Many of these changes point to the need to become a more intuitive organization.

While we don’t have a clear picture of what an ...As changes in global business continue to escalate, the time is right to start developing the kind of organization that can best adapt and thrive into the future. Many of these changes point to the need to become a more intuitive organization.

While we don’t have a clear picture of what an intuitive organization would look like we do have a better idea of what it is likely to feel like and be like. Most likely it will have an intuitively skilled workforce of people who are engaged, emotionally connected, committed and productive who conduct their work in a positive well-managed workplace in a way that is free from the debilitating effects of stress in a customer-focused business environment that is reflexive, adaptive and responsive to changes in business.

Here are the major impacts that give rise to the need for an intuitive organization.

Productivity – The next wave of productivity after technology is likely to come from investments in human capital. An intuitive organization is more likely to achieve the continuous productivity breakthroughs that will enable it to stay competitive.
Global skills & communication – As cultural divides break down and interconnected partnerships evolve with workplaces that span the globe, a more intuitive communication style helps people to understand one another better.
Stress as passé. The cost impacts of workforce deterioration through stress and task overload can make an organization unable to sustain itself on the global market. An intuitive workforce works better without it and indeed cannot function well with it.
Reducing stress and poor management that contributes to it increases the ability for people to be intuitive from the alte
ative – the mind and body numbing inertia of busy people who produce little real results. Doing less but achieving more is much better.
Innovation – Limited minds create limited innovation. Unfettered intuitive minds can unleash creativity and identify solutions that conceive of a tomorrow that is beyond our comprehension today and better meet the emerging needs and demands of it’s clients and customers.
Leadership – Leaders need to do more than come up with a strategy that may or may not win or that fails during implementation. Leaders who mobilize people from a holistic point of view through an engaging vision will compel winning outcomes in business. Intuitive leaders will be able to build and communicate whole vision in ways that motivate their organizations to follow through.
Responsiveness – Businesses need processes that allow them to adapt to emerging markets and client needs beyond contemporary business analysis. Anticipating tomorrow’s needs becomes more relevant than studying yesterday’s trends. Intuitive business intelligence processes need to stand and perform alongside traditional methods.

Virtually all of the above have a common element in the need to develop intuitive capabilities as personal workforce skills within as supportive environment. Dysfunctional, politically negative or poorly managed organizations do not suit the intuitive organization model.

Building an intuitive organization will take both effort and experimentation with appropriate skill development and training support for direct applications in performance, innovation and business intelligence. Each have some differing development needs and specialized process outcomes. At operational levels its’ presence can improve communication, decisions, anticipating outcomes and earlier problems-solving.

It is important to point out that intuition is a whole person phenomenon that starts with the individual and goes beyond that person’s work related interests. An intuitive organization will need to appreciate that difference and respect the integrity of the individual. Intuitive intelligence is not an attribute that should be or can be only subservient to a company’s self-interest.

Intuition needs to stand alongside analytical business processes during it’s adaptive phase until people and organizations have demonstrated the confidence, experience and capability to let this type of reasoning replace some of the under-performing less reliable and costly business processes. And this doesn’t decry the importance of technology. Instead it focuses on a better deployment of more relevant technology usage in a way that creates leaner overhead and clearer performance linkages.

Organizations and leaders need to comprehend the business value of intuitive cognition processes as they outperform analytical processes requiring speed or immediacy, are more predictive and anticipatory for early and unprecedented issues than cognitive reasoning, result in a deeper bond and communication in relationships, help people to read between the lines, and perhaps most relevant, are ultimately more economical to deploy.

An organization that wants truly engaged employees must be prepared to welcome the truly engaged person to the organization and find ways that continue to inspire them. Your leaders and managers have to convincingly expend the time and effort do this. It is, in effect, an organization upside down. Considering the level of education most workers have today and the gap between their ability to apply that intelligence to their job, it is a better option than under-using and thereby under-engaging your workforce. In reality, organizations that truly succeed are about to get a lot better.

There are challenges for trainers, managers and business leaders but these are entirely consistent with other performance development issues. Good business reasons, followed by training and skill development plans, followed by curriculum, training and impact measures.

Here are some top-down ways to start building a more intuitive organization.

1. Intuitive Organization Defining Statement. Determine the good business reasons for becoming a more intuitive organization in terms of customer or client outcomes, business performance, operational processes and individual and team performance. Include a clear defining statement of this in your company’s mission and vision.

2. Intuition as a Competency. Define intuition as both a desired personal competency and organizational competency. Determine the qualities that would reflect performance for both. Include capabilities for communication, innovation, making decisions and solving problems.

3. Business Intelligence Processes. Assess your business intelligence processes to determine the best fit or a revised process to include intuitive feedback in relevant market and business performance processes. Identify the relevant information areas needed and the people, departments or sources best equipped to bring this information forward. Include a review of the business process to determine what environmental or human environment requirements may need to be introduced such as a quiet space or process separation from more noisy, distracting, and debate oriented aspects of the process. With the help of OD specialists and training facilitators design a process for collecting the data.

4. Intuition in Innovation. Review your organizational commitments and strategies for innovation and specific innovation goals to include intuition as a support for the innovation process alongside creative thinking and defined operational outcomes. Modify your innovation process to include linkages for intuitive cognition in areas where it can be an important asset, ie. the early idea or conceptualization phase, as implementation feedback, in the product or service design and adaptation phase, in customer relations and communication.

5. Building Intuitive Skills. Determine specific training and development programs for leaders, staff, and specific staff involved in business intelligence processes with relevant curriculum and learning goals. Typically this involves experiential training around building intuitive awareness, bodily non-intellectual sensing processes, learning to use intuitive vision and insight, building creativity and intuition with self-reflective and meditative processes, learning how to translate intuitive information into valid uses, distinguishing between intuition and non-intuitive information and cues, establishing ground rules and environmental factors that support intuitive cognition, effective recognition and communication of issues, application of training to relevant real world issues, and setting measures that link forward to business results, personal and group outcomes and back to the development process to contribute to future improvements.