Breakthrough ideas change the world.
But they usually come from pursuing concepts that may seem totally outlandish to most people.
Who would have thought we would ever willingly step into a stranger’s car … Uber? Sleep in the apartment of someone we’ve never met in another country…Airbnb? Or upload our most important and sensitive files to an abstract field called the cloud?
It’s seems counterintuitive. Now it’s hard to imagine life without them.
By their very nature, counterintuitive ideas lead the way to possibilities few others are interested in considering. This is why they can be such rich creative breakthroughs.
Often it’s gut instincts – and gut instincts are enormously helpful in many situations. A huge amount of genius can pop to the surface all at once as intuition. It just feels right. You process a lot of information, and you make the right decision. When you ask leaders what they rely upon most, intuition, data or the advice of others, they consistently say intuition.
But intuition can lead us astray because what feels like intuition can often be flawed thinking or bias. And it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. People make prejudiced prejudgements in milliseconds without even engaging their conscious minds.
So should we listen to our intuition when considering a big new audacious idea?
One of the world’s leading researchers on intuition says, “Trust your intuition, but verify it.”
When pursuing a new idea, be flexible. Listen to your gut, yes, but investigate the data too, ask critical questions, and use your intuition as a working hypothesis that needs to be tested.
Being flexible means paying attention to your intuition, but not trusting them blindly while embracing the difficult and the absurd. Open space to entertain outlandish solutions even if they are totally counter-intuitive.
That’s how ideas become breakthroughs that change the world.
