Legitimizing the gut feel: the role of intuition in business

Organizations have never faced a more turbulent, complex or changing environment. Traditional managerial approaches need to be supplemented to enable business to survive. Making sense of complexity requires holistic, lateral, intuitive thinking – right‐brain skills that can be improved and developed. These skills need to become legitimate features to identify, discuss and develop in business settings. Argues that right‐brain skills are vital to the development of the five main qualities of a continuously learning organization:customercentred vision; systemic thinking; alignment; empowerment; and openness. These five characteristics are identified as crucial to organizational success and are explained more fully using practical examples. Concludes that managers will be selected and developed using quite different criteria from those used to build the bureaucracies of the past.