Have you ever had a flash of insight in the shower, when you’re brushing your teeth, or even just before you fall asleep? If you want to know more about this serendipity, then you should learn about “strategic intuition.”
The heart of strategic intuition mostly has to do with your mind combining existing ideas in new ways to solve a problem that you might be facing.
At a recent conference, I caught up with Columbia Business School professor William Duggan to talk about his new book, Strategic Intuition. The book recently received a very favorable review in The Wall Street Journal.
In this podcast, Professor Duggan offers advice to anybody who is trying to improve any process or trying to do anything creative. Check it out –
Link to Original Audio Source
About Professor Duggan
William Duggan is the author of three recent books on strategic intuition as the key to innovation: Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy (2002); The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens (2003); and Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (forthcoming, 2007). He also has authored three previous books.
Duggan has 20 years’ experience as a strategy adviser and consultant. He teaches strategic intuition in three venues at Columbia Business School: MBA courses, Executive MBA courses and Executive Education sessions. He also sometimes teaches the core MBA course Strategy Formulation.
Tags: Innovation, Strategic Intuition
Paul,
I found this fascinating, thanks for putting together the podcast. I have a question.
In the discussion about Expert Intuition vs. Strategic Intuition it is discussed that Expert is fast while Strategic is slow. I think that Expert is fast because of the preparation and dedication given by the expert. So finally here is my question: can you dedicate time to train your mind to be faster on Strategic Intuition? In other words, can you train though relaxation techniques or something else to make the process any more natural or instinctive and thereby making it faster?
What are your thoughts?
Training (or rather, learning) can make strategic intuition happen more naturally and more instinctively. That makes it “faster” in the sense of happening more often, and sooner after all the elements are in your brain. But the flash of insight doesn’t take a shorter time from start to finish. But the wait for it to happen does indeed get shorter. And you can learn to put yourself in to the state of “present of mind” (step 2 of strategic intuition) much faster, and indeed come close to turning it on at will — which is what the disciplines of martial arts strive for and teach as mental discipline.