Listening to Your Intuition: An Integrative Approach to Navigating VUCA

Abstract

There are several definitions available for intuition in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy and ancient wisdom literature. Since intuition is an internal process of tracing perceiving and interpreting information, this topic usually remains outside the scope of mainstream entrepreneurship and management scholarly research. However, entrepreneurs and managers use intuition for various purposes in navigation VUCA situations. They use it for solving problems in business, for ethical decision making to solving dilemmas or for creating new combinations and novelty. Based on the way information is being processed we can identify six types of intuition. Problem solving intuition, expert intuition, intellectual intuition and moral intuition are aiming a convergence in information processing while entrepreneurial/creative intuition allows a divergence in information processing. Furthermore spiritual intuition hails from deeper levels of consciousness and can be considered as a conscious process while all the other types are regarded as a result of non-conscious activities of information processing. All types can be applied by entrepreneurs in different stages of the entrepreneurial life cycle. Each type may have different antecedents and its effect could be different as each enhances or evokes a different source. Especially the spiritual intuition requires more study. In this chapter we address these types of intuition and explore their use and trainability in the context of entrepreneurship for navigating VUCA. Given the special nature of spiritual intuition we suggest using another term for this type of intuition such as subtle knowledge or use intuition in its pure form and therefore only for spiritual intuition. We then consider the other types as hunches coming in an unconscious pattern and having a different source at the level of memory while spiritual intuition has a source at the level of Being or Atman.