Ratio plus intuition is MORE

'Maybe I didn't appreciate your intuitive side at the time. Maybe the organization was not ready for it, because reason prevailed.' It moved me to receive this sincerely expressed thought from her. 

Since we both left ABN AMRO almost ten years ago, I've seen her on LinkedIn on a regular basis. And I now hear that she also sees me and my blogs. She is now a director in another organization, while I work independently for various organizations. In our work environments ratio still plays the leading role.

I spontaneously invited her to catch up and share memories. So now we walk through the forest together, and have a frank and personal conversation. About our work, our children, our partners and our dreams. Without a business agenda, with attention to each other and time to enjoy some scarce sunshine on a bench. 

We laugh when we think back to the fun we had when we stocked up on craft supplies at the discount store. And we are proud of ourselves when we think back to the faces of the top managers when we put them on tinkering during an offsite meeting in an old warehouse in order to shape their vision of the future. 

At first the managers looked at the canvases with concern and move back at the idea of getting their hands dirty with finger paints and children's glue. ‘This is the safest for your expensive suits,' we joked.

I wrapped up the idea of making the future visual in a rational argument: creativity helps to get both sides of the brain to work together and look more broadly at this challenge. There was fresh resistance and discomfort, but as they talked, the jackets came off and they made a tentative start. The result was nine colorful canvases with a story, which together formed the big, common picture about the future.

‘For me it was and still is quite common to do such things with management teams,’ I reply to her comment that at the time she thought it was quite a pioneering idea of mine. I only realize now that it was not nearly as common for the organization and these managers as it was for me. Looking back, it's a great example of how I framed my intuition in rational arguments to get something like this done in the ratio-driven banking environment. Intuitively I sensed the urgency for these men to get to know themselves and each other from a different side and share their thoughts with each other more spontaneously. To make them do that I had to bring it in a different way. 

Nowadays I  am more open about the power of intuition and use it oftener and more consciously. It is easy to follow the 'I don't see it so it doesn't exist' censorship of the rational brain. An alternative, especially when something is difficult or fails, is to look for extra essential information from your intuition and use it together with your rational brain to your advantage. 

She asks about the horses that I use for this purpose, because she read my blog about them. ‘The horse always works intuitively and helps the management team discover what they themselves intuitively already know, but which their rationally driven heads cannot easily reach out to. How this works seems magical, but the result is crystal clear and gives more direction and color to the future, just like the finger painting did back then,' I tell her. 

I invite her to work together again and to experience the power when the two worlds of reason and intuition come together, with or without the help of a horse. And that invitation is hereby extended to you, the reader.