Gisle Henden

Intuition: and Its Role in Strategic Thinking Gisle Henden

Even though intuition is recognized as imperative in strategic thinking management literature is surprisingly silent on the issue. This inquiry thus provides an historical review of philosophical, psychological and management theory on intuition. It reveals that philosophers conceive intuition as rational while psychologists tend not to. Philosophers do so primarily because intuition is anchored in Ideas, Forms and Archetypes, which are perceived as apriori laws governing and conditioning all existence. The argument is that intuition is the ontological foundation for any normative theory of rationality. Implications for the rationality debate are discussed. Three levels of intuition are discerned and contrasted with analytical thinking. The first and second levels correspond to intuitions from the personal and collective unconscious experience respectively. They can be either introverted or extroverted. The third level corresponds to what some philosophers call the non-dual, integral state of mind.