The Ultimate Secret To Finding Solutions: Logic And Intuition

Challenges abound in our world: Climate change, widening socioeconomic and political divides, corruption. And you are determined to contribute to the pursuit of solutions this year. Yet the problems are daunting.

You feel like useful answers require nothing less than an epiphany. However, if you wait for an “aha moment” to strike, you may end this year empty-handed. And relying on intense, rational thinking most likely won’t do the trick either.

What can you do? Cultivate your intuition and take action to bring on more “aha moments.”

Guess what. These moments of clarity, no matter how you feel, usually don’t occur solely by chance. And intuition doesn’t spring out of the blue. Your actions set the stage.

As you engage with the world, and especially with others in it, you develop the bases for both. The more varied your experiences, the better. And you should allow yourself to undergo some discomfort in the process.

A Spear in the Chest Moment

You may be familiar with the following story told by the late Ray Anderson about his epiphany.

Anderson, the CEO of the modular floor covering the company, Interface, described his “spear in the chest moment” frequently.

In his book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, he wrote about waking up one morning and realizing that his company was plundering the earth. His colorful portrayal of this illuminating flash doesn’t reveal the whole story, however.

Anderson confessed he experienced nagging concerns about the environment in the back of his mind for a while. Perhaps his intuition was telling him something was amiss.

Then Interface risked losing a significant sale from an unhappy customer upset with the company’s likely impact on the environment. An associate in the research division invited Anderson to kick off the first meeting of a task force he assembled to tackle the challenge.

In preparing his remarks, Anderson came across Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce, which he credited with sparking his life-changing moment of clarity.

Did Anderson’s insight occur by chance? Not really. His epiphany came from a series of events and exposures that ultimately triggered his intuition and led to his new understanding.

Creating a Context

What can you learn from Ray Anderson’s story? Don’t wait idly for an epiphany to strike. Stay open to people, information, and experiences that cultivate keen intuition. Then pay attention to it.

Create conditions that will make your “aha moments” more likely.

Here are a few suggestions:

Change your environment and routines.

Sometimes the key to cracking the most intractable dilemmas is to do something out of the ordinary. Pick up a book in a field that is not your own. Visit an out-of-the-way country. Join an interest group or volunteer. The key is to seek experiences that provide you with a different lens on the world.

Lean into your many roles.

We are employees or employers, parents, friends, activists, citizens of our communities. Our multiple identities enable us to experience the problems we wish to address from various perspectives. Consider all of these angles.

Give yourself time to play.

Often, the harder you try to find solutions to wicked problems, the more elusive the answers. Rest your brain and unload your stress. Engage in activities that take you out of your head for a time. Go to the gym or walk in the woods. Play with your dog or go out for a beer with your buddies. The answer to your problem may sneak up on you.

You could experience a moment of clarity when you least expect it.

---

If you believe that “aha moments” are a matter of chance, think again. While revelations may not occur every day, they seldom come out of nowhere. You can take steps to make these insightful experiences more likely.

Give yourself the freedom to dream, act, and interact with the world. While logic is essential, emotions can provide us with valuable insights as well for solving wicked problems.

Assumptions aside, listen to both your head and your heart. After all, what is an epiphany? It is a powerful incident that you experience as sudden with both rational and emotional components.

As you become open to all kinds of encounters and give yourself the freedom to dream, you may find new ways to contribute to addressing society’s collective challenges.