Mike Lehr's Blog

While helping a non-profit, a board member said, “We can only deal with a problem if we know there is one.” Here the state knowledge assumes alters our perspective. In this case, it causes us to ignore the idea of prevention, dealing with problems before they arise. In reality, problems don’t care whether we know or prove they exist. Thus, if knowledge’s form can alter our perspective and prevent us from seeing potential solutions, it is important to have a grasp on the different states of knowledge.

To that end, I’ve created the map to the right. It has five basic states: Unknown, Aware, Know, Prove and Quantify. Each is a subset of the previous one:

Knowledge Map

• Unknown: Not knowing what we don’t know
• Aware: Knowing what we don’t know, or not being able to express what we do know
• Know: Knowing without proof but being able to express what we know
• Prove: Using approaches that adhere closely to the scientific method or the one used in courts of law.
• Quantify: Being able to count, calculate or formulate.

By looking at knowledge’s states in this manner, we see how much reality we exclude if we only accept what is quantifiable and provable. Imagine in warfare or the game of poker if we took no action unless we could prove it was the right one. Business is not immune to this. Therefore, success is more determined by how we treat what we don’t know or barely know and not by how we treat what we can prove and quantify. Thus, if we lived by the advice of the board member above, we would surely fail without a great amount of fortune.

Roles of Intuition and Cognition in Decision Making

In terms of the decision-making process, intuition occurs before cognition. The important practical implication of this process is this: if we don’t grasp the underlying emotions and how intuition is driving a decision or action, then we really don’t understand it. Thus, behind every single decision or action, there will be an emotion or a collection of emotions driving it.

An excellent illustrator of the connection between intuition and cognition is radar. Let the appearance of something on radar represent intuition and the actual sighting of it be cognition. The key implication of this metaphor is that intuition comes before cognition in our entire decision-making process. The movement of something from radar to an actual sighting represents the movement of feelings into thoughts and finally into decisions and actions.

The diagram to the right expresses this relationship. Moving from left to right, intuition processes our emotions which are typically a collection of feelings. Our emotions create our desires, wants and needs. Through these intuition gives our cognition direction. This direction allows cognition to create thoughts. Using techniques such as reason and logic, through cognition a collection of thoughts coalesce into a rationale. These rationales form the expressible, concrete foundation of our decisions and actions.

In short, this decision-making process transforms our vague, generalized emotions into concrete decisions and actions. An excellent metaphor is the igniting of gasoline. Without the concrete form of an engine and car, this event is a potentially harmful explosion. With that form, the event becomes a transformative tool in our lives. Similarly, without the techniques and tools to express ourselves, our emotions lack a practicality that will allow us to enhance our lives. In some cases, they might even harm ourselves and others.