What does all this have to do with life? It means that, in life, we're all faced with many choices. John Rollwagen who was the Chief Executive Officer of Cray, said, "I believe very strongly that many times there is no right decision but to get on with it. I don't care what you do. The important thing is to move ahead. Let's just do it, because you're not going to be right or wrong. It's just one route and you can fix it after you start. But if you never start, you can never get there. That's for damn sure." Just do it. The point is that when you make your choice, it's just one route of many. And if you find out later it was a mistaken choice, you can fix it any time you want to. This is the philosophy that those of us who try to listen to our intuitive voices really believe in.
During the 1995 NAEB annual meeting, I was with a group who wanted to see Beverly Hills. So we got in a car and took off. No map. We had no idea how to get there. But we went, knowing that we had taken the essential step of starting and that we could always get directions if we really got lost. I suppose in the back of our minds was Henry Kissinger's comment, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." There's nothing wrong with not knowing where you're going occasionally. What is important, however, is simply to get into the process. Once you get into the process, if you have character and if you have competence, you'll find your way to an appropriate destination. Chairman Mao, who is now politically correct to quote (another observation on the power of change), said, "The longest journey begins with a single step." Take one.
How does intuitive leadership relate to leading a work team? Intuitive methods are quite compatible with leading work teams, if you understand the nature of the particular teams involved. There are teams and there are teams. Some meet the definition of the kinds of teams we want in the workplace today. Intuitive leadership is, in fact, the best way to lead those teams. My grandfather was a "gandy dancer." A gandy dancer was a person who worked with a team of other gandy dancers on the replacement of ties and rail on the railroad. The gandy dancers used gandy bars to pull the spikes. The spikes had to be pulled in a rhythmic sequence or they would have all kinds of problems. They couldn't have people pulling spikes out of the approved sequence or the rail would come under tension and it could snap and kill people. The gandy dancers had to do it in proper order and in unison. There wasn't any room on this team for creative and innovative gandy dancers. And their team boss couldn't afford to take instructions from his inner voice. He had to get everyone to follow the rules.
Some people call a symphony orchestra a team. But if you think about it, you'll conclude that, like a gandy dancer who has no opportunity to exercise independent thought or independence of action, the members of a symphony orchestra don't either. Who exercises command and control for the symphony? The conductor. The orchestra is not only limited to playing what the conductor allows them to play, they play the way the conductor demands. That isn't the kind of team we're looking for in today's workplace, either.
If you want to see what a real team is go look a jazz quartet. Nobody is the boss. The critical nature of the music depends on how well the musicians listen to each other, build on each other's musical ideas, pass the lead around to each other, and support the soloist innovations. That, in fact, is the kind of a team we need in our workplaces. No one is in control. There aren't any right answers, there aren't any wrong answers. There are simply opportunities. Intuitive leadership of these kinds of workplace teams can be tremendously successful.
Like with a jazz quartet, strategic thinking is linked to strategic improvisation. What that means for us as leaders is that we are all challenged with knowing where we want to go and then making critical mid-course corrections, which are many in their nature, small in their individual impact, but in their aggregate form and shape our culture and our behavior. This is where we need to learn to apply intuitive methods, rather than paralyzing ourselves with collections of data to drive our decisions. That's what makes us slow and non-competitive.
Intuitive leadership takes knowledge, character, competence, and wisdom; and demands that we ask the question, "Is this the right thing to do?" That should be our governing question whenever we are dealing with intuition. Remember, intuition is not luck, it's not whimsy. It has a very solid foundation because it's built first upon character and then upon towering competence.
If we're going to try to draw out our intuitive self, we need to begin by finding it. One way is to flip a coin the next time you have trouble making a decision. Out of pure desperation, when you're really troubled, say heads is A, tails is B, and flip it. John Rollwagen, the Cray CEO I mentioned earlier articulated the reason very well when he said, "It's a wonderful way to make decisions, not because you do what the coin says, but because you have that instantaneous recognition when the coin hits whether you like the results or not. And that's the answer. Don't go with the coin, go with how you feel after the coin has landed." I've practiced that my entire life and didn't know any other human being had the same thought until I read this quotation. So, you can imagine how I was absolutely captivated by it! In decision making, we have to learn to do more questioning of how we feel about the alternatives.
More about men, women, and intuition: Most men think they have no intuition. Worse, they think there's something wrong with it. They treat it like some sort of witchcraft. But, in fact, it isn't that at all. Men have learned to subordinate intuition to rationality in an effort to maintain control. I'm afraid, in that sense, we haven't progressed very far since the days we lived in caves. Imagine coming home after a tough, unsuccessful day of mammoth hunting, and walking into the mouth of the cave where your lovely wife, who hasn't learned anything about intuition yet, is waiting in her bear skin coat. And she says to you, "Honey, how was the hunt?". What do you suppose the reaction would be? From the earliest encounters, which were largely predominated by the males' superior physical presence, women had to figure out how to achieve their ends with different means. For millennia, they have very successfully learned to listen to their inner voices. Their inner voice allows them to read body language, for example. Most of us guys say, "I never saw that. I never realized it was a problem." One of the reasons is that when our inner voice tries to talk to us, we interrupt, "Wait a second! Wrong thought, wrong thought!" And so we ignore it.
Another thing women are particularly good at is trusting their senses. Their ability to learn by touching and hearing is so well developed because they've had to adapt to an environment which has generally disregarded their opinions. So, they had to learn to read catch phrases, intonation, stress on a syllable, to figure out what was going on. They can read more in a single conversation with us about our sincerity, commitment, desire, and willingness, than we can believe. We usually don't even know what we've said. But they know what we mean! We sometimes create tremendous problems for ourselves by failing to recognize this.
We also create tremendous problems in our organizations, not so much because we're uncaring, unfeeling oafs, but because we focus on our public selves and are simply not in touch with our inner selves. The problem is that our private self wouldn't behave the way our public self does. Our private self, when it walks into the house and begins interacting with the family, would no more behave the way we behave in the workplace than the man in the moon. But, when we come to the workplace we become someone else. We take what common sense we have, cast it aside, and turn into the prototypical organization man. One of the great challenges I offer is to learn how to deal with that.
There are certain males who understand what intuition is and they use it. The film industry is a Mecca for those men. You can't make a good movie if you can't be in touch with your intuition. The director, Sidney Pollack says, "Intuitive leadership is free association. It's the ability to be in touch. It's where you get ideas. And it is the ability to trust the ideas once you have them, even though they may break some rules. And it's the competence to trust those ideas once you've identified them. Then, you cannot be afraid to fail."
We work in organizations and, there, we interact with people all the time. We're under a lot of pressure, too. We can't afford to adopt Kurt Vonnegut's philosophy from Player Piano, which is, "If it weren't for the people if it weren't for them earth and organizations would be an engineer's paradise." That's how we sometimes think about our jobs. School teachers can insert "students." Deans can substitute "faculty." When we allow ourselves to blame the people we work with for spoiling our enjoyment of our jobs, what we're really doing is devaluing them and failing to be in touch with ourselves.
What role do mistakes play in all this? Intuitive leadership demands the courage to go ahead with what you feel is the right thing to do. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to go with your intuition and not be stopped by the fear of making a mistake. It's the kind of courage the men who sat in LSTs off Omaha Beach on June 6th, 50 years ago needed. It's knowing in your heart of hearts that you're doing the right thing. It's also knowing that if you fail, all that means is you attempted to reach out for what you knew was right, and a misstep is something from which you will learn.
Fear of failure is a critical obstacle to progress in our organizations today. What we have to do is drive fear out. Our intuition tells us that the reason we and our people are slow to respond is often that we're worried about the consequences of a mistake. My challenge to you is to learn to celebrate your mistakes publicly and teach your people to do the same. I know that sounds somewhat odd, but in my organizations I have such a program in place. When mistakes are made, we ask the person very quickly, very loudly, to proclaim the fact that they made a mistake. Secondly, we ask them to explain what the mistake was. And thirdly, we ask them to explain what they learned and what we can learn from that mistake. We do this in groups of ten. We ask their consent to videotape these sessions. We then show those tapes to other groups of people once a month. We select the best mistake from the lot and I buy that individual and their spouse dinner at any restaurant of their choice in the city of Houston. My intuition, certainly not my analytical self, allowed me to come up with that ides. The practice has turned out to be absolutely wonderful. The ability in my organization to get beyond the fear of failure has enabled us to move forward rapidly to implement the people's innovative ideas. We no longer fear mistakes, we celebrate them.
We have to be able to discern the right course of action and know that our inner voice sometimes gives us that familiar gut feeling that we can make it. When that happens, we have to seize the opportunity to make a difference. The screen saver on my PC says, "Carpe Visio" seize the vision. That reminds me every day to understand that my inner voice is there and to listen to it. It reminds me to listen for the right thing to do, not for how to do things right.
Every good idea will always have followers. The problem is it won't have implementers or activators. I challenge you to be an innovator and activator in your pursuit of intuitive leadership. If you work at this, you will never again have the experience Mark Twain referred to when he wrote, "I was never able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one."
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