We have all heard of IQ and what it has meant in the past. With today’s complex workplace moving at such a rapid pace, it is now intuition that has become more valuable. What does your gut say based on experiences and surveillance of the external environment? Is this a course that could help the company excel, or could it sink it?
Intuition can help us look at and contemplate complex issues and can help push decision making. Intuition and creativity inspire a broader look at all the issues, encouraging us to expand our thinking. It is not enough to follow the rules and obey past practices. A new approach is needed to succeed.
In an IBM report of 2010, the key to complex problem solving – and valued skills among leaders – identifies four critical behaviors:
Creativity
Comfort with Ambiguity
Challenging the Status Quo
Ability to Change During Innovation.
The selection of highly intuitive and creative people with those behavioral traits will help organizations solve problems. There is no doubt that the new workplace requires different approaches to be successful. Hiring employees with intuition will be important, as will creating an empowering, stimulating environment in which intuition and creativity are allowed to flourish.
A challenge, of course, is creating a culture in which managers who might not be initially comfortable with this idea, one that allows team members to experiment and fail. Senior leaders need to set the pace build the environment where this can happen. The choices are clear, though: innovate with creative, intuitive people, or watch your competition to do it instead.
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Barbara Phillips, Senior Vice President with Learning Dynamics, wrote this article.