Despite the apparent lack of any scientific evidence of its accuracy, most successful entrepreneurs place a high value on intuition for making decisions. They pride themselves on following their gut, or having hunches that turn out to be right.

Frequently entrepreneurs claim to have rejected what ‘made sense’ and followed their intuition instead. Whenever they fail to listen to that little voice of warning that a deal will go sour, or disregard that feeling that something doesn’t quite add up it ends in tears.

Successful entrepreneurs can sniff out a great product line, attract the best suppliers and follow the best leads. There is no logic to their good decisions which is why others who try to copy or mimic their actions fail.

It would seem that a finely honed intuition is what makes the difference between a good business person and a great entrepreneur

New age visualisation and meditation is often viewed as fluffy psychobabble in the rational world of business, yet without intuition the world becomes a barren place of cold logic.

There are few great scientific advances made without intuition. Einstein created his theories of relativity after a visualising sitting on the front of a beam of light and imagining what happens as he travelled along it.

The discoverer of the chemical makeup of Benzene only managed to unravel the problem of ‘too few hydrogen atoms’ after dreaming of a snake wound in a circle eating its own tail. This image led him to the realisation that the only way the benzene molecule could be made stable is if the carbon atoms were arranged in a circle just like the snake.

With little scientific support for intuition it has been hard for entrepreneurs to understand, trust or quantify its impact. Until now that is…

Research conducted by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson of the Centre for Organizational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University Business School suggested that intuition is a real phenomenon that is caused by the way our brains store, retrieve and process information (source Science Daily Mar. 6, 2008).

This and other research suggest that our brains make almost instantaneous decisions based on a combination of generalisations made from previous experiences, matching this with current external stimuli to make a decision. When this happens it seems to bypass our conscious (rational, logical) mind so that we are left with a general or vague feeling that something is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Professor Hodgkinson reported an incident where a racing driver had inexplicably stopping mid race when the visible road ahead was clear. The driver simply felt he had to stop.

During forensic analysis by psychologists the diver was shown a video and mentally relived the event. As he watched the video he realised that the crowd were looking the wrong way. Instead of looking at him and cheering as he approached a bend they were looking silently at something around the bend. This was the cue that triggered him to brake. He did not process this consciously but simply stopped seemingly without thinking.

Psychoanalysis, NLP and hypnosis have, for many years, held that the mind has two aspects that work in completely different ways

These two aspects are the unconscious (sometimes called the subconscious) mind and the conscious mind.

The conscious mind uses logic and rational thought. But (according to research) this is limited to only 5 – 9 ideas or pieces of information at a time.

The bulk of all our thinking is outside of our conscious awareness. It happens unconsciously and research suggests that the unconscious mind processes over 2 million bits of information at a time. The rest is filtered out of our conscious awareness. If you were aware of everything you would be utterly overwhelmed

This explains why learning to drive is overwhelming but once you can do it without thinking (consciously) and have got it ‘in the muscle’ you can arrive safely at your destination and have no memory of the journey.

Due to its much greater processing power the unconscious mind is better suited to making decisions with large amounts of data

When we access this it’s known as intuition.

Intuitive hunches happen when your unconscious mind makes instant evaluations based on previous patterns which it can do much more quickly than the conscious mind can. It should be noted though, that like any computer the accuracy of intuitive hunches is based on past experiences, and some experiences can lead to errors or jumping to the wrong conclusions. This happens when your mind wrongly assumes that one bad experience means the same bad thing will happen every time.

There is nothing spooky or magic about it. It is simply the way the mind was designed to work. With training it is possible to ensure your mind’s programming is working perfectly and increase intuition to the level where others will think you are psychic!