Mike Lehr's Blog

Frequently, I’m asked about the difference between instinct and intuition. The question is difficult because everyday conversation has a gender bias. Men tend to prefer the word “instinct” over “intuition” to describe their emotional processes while women tend to prefer the reverse. So, listening skills are important.

Analogously, instinct is to intuition what an accented note is to a song. Just as an accent adds a particular emphasis to a specific note in the song, instinct adds a particular emphasis to an emotion in the intuitive process. Very simply, there are three types of instincts: survival, paternal and maternal. Survival protects our well being through fight or flight. It accentuates emotions such as guardedness or avoidance. Paternal extends our dominance and control, accentuating emotions such as aggressiveness and competitiveness. Maternal protects and nurtures others, accentuating emotions such as protectiveness and sacrifice.

While instincts can serve us well in urgent, severe situations, they can lead us astray and allow us to be easily manipulated in modern life’s intricacies. For instance, instinctively lashing out at someone for a threatening act could have consequences in the workplace. Intuition would help us balance the emotions accentuated by that threat with the ones fearing the consequences to arrive at a pragmatic alternative fitting our context.

Returning to our musical analogy, this means that rather than reacting to the one accented note we are waiting to hear the whole song before we think and act. It also means that while there isn’t much to creating a single note, creating a song is more involved. Therefore, just as it takes practice to develop cognitive skills it also takes practice to develop intuitive ones. Instincts are innate and thus our default. As such they require very little, if any, development.

Word choice is a function of personality. Yes, circumstances like jobs might require specific words but much room remains to choose other words. Sometimes, a single expression can give us all the insight we need.

For example, while with a previous employer, I helped a call center with customer service strategies and techniques over the phone. The center was transitioning between managing executives. When the new executive arrived, she heard about my help’s success. She wanted to meet and discuss me joining her team. After laying out her vision, she showed me a chart expressing the new functional detail for each job. Each job was shown as a box.

At the end of her review, she closed by pointing to the chart and asking, “So Mike, what I really want to know is which box do you want to be in?” To see the significance of this insight into her personality, it would help to contrast it with other possibilities:

• “. . . which box do you want to be in?”
• “. . . what kind of contribution would you like to make?”
• “. . . how would you like to help me?”
• “. . . where do you think your talents might work best?”
• “. . . where does your interest lie?”

What happened in this executive’s case is that her feelings about her reorganization plan produced certain emotions. They caused her intuition to influence her cognition in a manner that caused her to express people as mere fillers of boxes. We can see the emotional differences between her question and these other variants. Emotions illuminate personalities.

In the end, as you probably suspected, I did not join her team. She left the company after only being there thirteen months.

As we saw with an earlier post, intuition arrives first when we make decisions. But, how does this happen? How does intuition become involved in our response to an event?

Consider for a moment a restaurant’s ambiance. Objectively, it has nothing to do with the food; however, if it’s unclean, disorderly and ugly we will tend to feel there is also something wrong with the food. Why do children ask their moms and dads, “Are you in a good mood?” They know their parents’ emotional state will affect their decision-making.

Figure 1 illustrates what’s happening. For any event, there are conscious (solid lines) and unconscious aspects (transparent lines). Our cognition cannot capture consciously all an event has to offer.    Analogously, ponder light: some of it we can see some we can’t (such as heat, infrared, ultraviolet and radiation). Still, even if we can’t see unseen light, it affects us. The same holds true for events. Even if we can’t consciously grasp the unconscious aspects; they slip through our conscious defenses and affect us.

Figure 2 demonstrates how this happens. The unconscious aspects impact our emotions which triggers our intuition. Our intuition produces more complex emotions that impact our cognition, our thinking processes. These emotions will select the rationale that best express our wants, desires and needs. These are a function of our personalities and give insights into who we are (red lines).

Returning to our restaurant analogy, the negative feelings produced by the ugly ambiance trigger negative emotions. These in turn encourage us to select a rationale that might have us translate the ugliness into unsanitary. Therefore, we’ll rationalize that the food is unsafe and not good. Conversely, if the ambiance produces good feelings, we will tend to like the food more.

Virtually all of our decisions are emotionally based. Therefore, as we saw in my previous posting, Decisions: Roles of Intuition and Cognition, intuition (link) plays a vital role in decision making. We often notice this as our confusion about the reasons people give for their decisions. This is because if don’t have a grasp on the emotions causing people on a subconscious level to gravitate to a rationale justifying what they want.

Since the business world often demands we have a rational orientation, we faulty believe that people make decisions about their actions as shown in the left-hand figure below.  If they find Rationale #1 as having the best set of reasons, evidence and logic, then people will select the recommended action associated with it, Action #1. If Rationale #3 is the best, then they select Action #3.

Shopping Rationales: Cognitive vs Intuitive Decisions

However, the right-hand figure shows that intuition, based upon people’s wants and desires, will actually determine the action then the corresponding rationale to support it. So, if people prefer Action #2, they will tend to select Rationale #2 because it justifies their decision. However, as the above embedded posting suggests, this shopping for a rationale will likely occur subliminally. This means that on a conscious, cognitive level, people will tend to believe they are making a rational decision even though they are not.

What does this mean in practical terms? First, good insight into the decision maker’s personality will enhance our abilities to predict his decisions even if we don’t have complete knowledge of the problem. Second, any of his decisions, even if they aren’t similar to the problem, will further our insights into his personality. Taking such an intuitive approach works because personality will always be more consistent than rationales.

In Robert Heinlein’s science fiction book, Starship Troopers, the instructor, Mr. Dubois says, “One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.” Automatically, a picture forms in my mind of a person who collects a garage full of tools and doesn’t fix anything or who collects a kitchen full of utensils and always orders out. There are many people who treat knowledge the same way; they collect it but never think about it or employ it.

Often I will begin certain seminars by declaring, “You won’t learn anything new, but if you’re like others, you’ll still find it helpful.” We are so preconditioned to view the stuffing of our minds as a benefit, that we have difficulty seeing how this could be true. So, I go on to say, “Most of what I will cover you already know; however, I will present it in a way that will encourage you to think about it differently and take action.”

I contend that rather than go out and collect more knowledge, if we just use even 20% of what we already know but don’t use, we would see substantial changes in our careers and lives. How many people collect business improvement books as though they were collecting stamps?

Intuitively, we know that we must consider the emotional aspect of knowledge. This appears in the form of motivation to think and employ that knowledge. Simply, learning something new shouldn’t be the benchmark of a worthwhile learning effort. Did it encourage us to look at things differently? Did it move us from inertia to action?

Now, that is real power.

The way people look at things is greatly influenced by how they feel about us. People like to hear their names and to have them remembered. Therefore, you can influence their intuitive processes by doing these. While many of us know this, we don’t realize how important it is. It’s an effort very deserving of our time and resources.

In journalism class, instructors will tell students that using names in articles is critical to securing readers’ interest. At a party, someone told me his favorite class was statistics because the professor remembered everyone’s names. A college professor said that a student focus group told his colleagues that professors could improve their course evaluations and standing with students by simply starting to remember and use students’ names in class.

What do names have to do with enjoying statistics or evaluating professors? A lot. They affect people’s intuition which in turns affects their cognition. Their cognition is responsible for producing the rationales that support people’s preferences. The more they like the messenger the more likely they’ll like the message; they’ll learn material, adopt initiatives and perform tasks much quicker and more effectively.

However, remembering people’s names, especially all your employees, might be difficult, but virtually all of us, if we work at it and “cheat” a bit can remember close to five hundred names. First, it’s a matter of saying, “This is important.” Second, it will initially seem like a daunting task, but we become better as we train ourselves. In this sense, our minds work very much like our muscles. They become stronger through training and practicing.

Here are some techniques for using and remembering names.

Since intuition is rooted in emotions and thus subjective, intuitive approaches allow us to see a single, objective situation as many. We see this most clearly when we tap two distinct, opposing emotions such as the fear of loss versus the joy of gain. The first is generally stronger in people than the second.

In the January 16, 2010 edition of The Economist an article titled “Designing Rewards – Carrots Dressed as Sticks” reported on a paper by Tanjim Hossain of the University of Toronto and John List of the University of Chicago outlining how they made a bonus plan more effective without changing one thing about the plan (i.e. more money, shorter time frame). Rather, they simply changed the wording of the letter outlining the plan’s details.

To one group, they communicated it in the traditional way: hit this target by the end of the week and earn the bonus. However, to another group they said that employees had “provisionally” earned the bonus but would lose it if they did not hit their targets; thus, pitting the “joy of gain” against the “fear of loss.”

Cognitively, objectivity says no difference exists. However, Hossain and List found that the second approach (fear of losing the provisional bonus) was much more motivational than the traditional approach (joy of gaining the bonus). Moreover, the motivational difference persisted over time even after employees understood the bonus better.

In effect, by tapping into the way people intuit different emotions (fear and joy) a single bonus plan becomes two distinct ones. That is the multiplying effect of an intuitive approach.

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.

Cognition is the refining of knowledge and the justifying of decisions through rationales. Rationales are thoughts linked by such techniques as reason and logic. They impact how we view things, both tangible and intangible. Cognition gives us a way to express ourselves, to express our desires, wants and needs.

Cognition is a process occurring primarily on a conscious level. “Refining” and “justifying” indicate that process. Since the formulation of thoughts occurs primarily in our conscious, cognition gives form to what our intuition creates. This form allows us to change our world in accordance with our desires, wants and needs.

Cognition is the refiner of virtually every decision we make, because almost everything we think, do or say needs some sort of refinement to give it focus and specificity before it can effectively impact our world. In this way, cognition crystallizes into a goal, objective or some other tangible form the direction that our intuition gives us. It’s similar to the way an agenda, a score or a script gives form to a meeting, a song or a play in accordance with the tone we want for them.

As an example of what cognition is, consider a message that seeks to influence people. It will contain a rationale using reason and logic to demonstrate the positive benefits of adopting the message. However, if the rationale is not understandable it will appear as unreasonable, illogical, incomplete or indecipherable. As a result, the message will have difficulty influencing people. Witness what happens to a computer when the coding does not follow the language or logic of a certain protocol. The same thing happens with people when confronted by rationales they do not understand. That is cognition at work.

Intuition is the acquiring of knowledge and the making of decisions through emotions. Emotions are feelings that go beyond our senses of touching, smelling, seeing, hearing and tasting. They indicate how we feel about intangibles such as concepts and personalities. For instance, if we like something, that is our emotions giving us knowledge.

Intuition is a process occurring primarily on a subconscious level. “Acquiring” and “making” indicate that process. Since all emotions begin in our subconscious and can often reside there forever without our conscious knowledge, intuition works in the subconscious to process what our emotions generate.

Intuition is the originator of virtually every decision we make, because everything we think, do or say begins on a subconscious level. In this way, intuition is the compass for our conscious similar to the way an introduction sets the tone for a meeting, a song or a play. Intuition is the deliverer of the raw ingredients for our decisions which our conscious refines and manifests so we can live in our world.

As an example of what intuition is, consider a messenger and the message. We can change how people interpret the message by changing the content of the message. However, we can also change how they interpret the message by changing the messenger. Witness the counter effect a repetitive commercial has when suddenly its celebrity messenger falls from grace. People’s interpretations change even though the message does not. That is intuition at work.