Can B-schools include a module on “How to be a trailblazer”? Can inspiration be deconstructed, set to an algorithm and thus made repeatable? Is there a management term for ‘sixth sense’? All my mêlée here in this article is in essence a return to an age old debate on the innate variance of management education. To what extent can intuition be taught so that success not just in an entrance examination but also in real life becomes less dependent on stone-faced research and analysis?
Anyway, the element of a hunch and intuitive choice of a right answer is what attracts any student immensely. It’s something that’s puzzled the folk over even at Harvard for a couple of decades. There may be a lot of unsolved aspects to the role of intuition in success; however, it is a fact that management education focuses a lot on the process, so much so, that students start to think of it as a universal truth rather than a simple rule of thumb. And it is at this point that lateral thinking gets compromised. As a result, cramming overtakes the sanctity of a thorough understanding of any subject. In simple terms, the more you work hard at understanding the fundamental concepts, the more developed will be your powers of deduction and thus intuition and hunches enter grandly!
The system itself should engender these revolutions by allowing students space for lateral thought rather than scramble to feed them. MBA graduates too, when a healthy combination of intuitive abilities and the skills learnt through a comprehension of all the theories is present, turn into massive juggernauts in leagues of their own. Because the fact of the matter is that management is not a strictly technical skill, rather it is a highly composite skill which requires theoretical knowledge but not without a well-honed, abstract, intuitive sense. Thus management education should adhere to the traditional meaning of ‘education’ which involves broadening the vistas of the mind, not equipping it with blinkers.
Management pedagogy is made up essentially of the same old case studies, classic home truths, a lot of typical human behavior deconstructed, disguised in jargon, perhaps even set to some scale for good measure, and re-presented as brand new information to the student. This information glut is to be structured with a strong assimilation of the ability that we have talked about and discussed in the earlier paragraphs.
Most success stories that I ever read anywhere talk of how one guy bucked the trend against better counsel and went on to re-write the rules of the game (a bit of oversimplification, I admit, but this is broadly how they go). And it is these freshly minted ‘rules’ that the students are fed. But this is where the difference lies in, say, a software designer and the software operator. The rules teach an operator what to do when presented with those precise circumstances sometime in their career. But what the rules were silent on was how to go about effecting the light-bulb moment that wrote those same rules.
Just imagine a world where intuitive abilities do not assist. From a researcher to a manager, from a teacher to a home-maker, from an entrepreneur to an artist, everyone needs to have oodles and oodles of inspired intuition to arrange and use the theories learnt and convert them into something that is not just productive but also stays valid for a long time. Train your intuition – you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide. Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality. It is indeed the magic that can help success come more surely for students and MBA-aspirants too. Though remember that intuition must ride the horses of hard-work to reach anywhere!
[Arvind Passey]
[2007]
Written for PT Education
