What is strate­gic intu­ition?

I have pre­vi­ously described coup d’oeil,^[1] and while I do like the term, it’s a bit of an issue to attempt the impor­ta­tion of a word from French with which the Eng­lish tongue will have dif­fi­culty pro­nounc­ing. To see it in print with­out aid, it’s impos­si­ble. It was this minor conun­drum which led me to opt for the phrase “strate­gic intu­ition” to describe my prac­tice. The term is, I feel, a good one, but a search for other uses of the phrase was of course nec­es­sary prior to using it as a busi­ness name. What I found was per­haps the best result. There does not appear to be a busi­ness by this name, nor is it a pop­u­lar phrase in business-speak… but the theme is known and under­stood in cer­tain cir­cles, in such a way as to under­score the impor­tance of what I’m describing.

Dr. William Dug­gan is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia Busi­ness School, where he teaches a course called Napoleon’s Glance. He is also a guest lec­turer for the Strate­gic Stud­ies Insti­tute of the U.S. Army War Col­lege and author of a two books on strat­egy, Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strat­egy^[2] and The Art of What Works—How Suc­cess Really Hap­pens.^[3] Quot­ing from Dr. Duggan’s course out­line for “Napoleon’s Glance:”

The term “Napoleon’s glance” comes from the early strat­egy lit­er­a­ture. The word “strat­egy” entered the Eng­lish lan­guage in 1810, as mil­i­tary schol­ars rushed to study the suc­cess of Napoleon Bona­parte, who won more bat­tles than any other gen­eral in recorded his­tory. Over time the study of strat­egy spread to other fields, espe­cially busi­ness. The first schol­arly study of strat­egy, On War (1832) by Carl von Clause­witz, shows the key to Napoleon’s suc­cess as coup d’oeil, which means “glance” in French. Today we rec­og­nize coup d’oeil as strate­gic intu­ition: ordi­nary intu­ition is just a feel­ing, but strate­gic intu­ition comes from real knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, brought together in a flash of insight to suit the sit­u­a­tion. It’s the “big Aha!” — or a series of lit­tle ones — that shows you the way ahead.

Duggan’s work in “con­nect­ing the dots” between Napoleon’s strate­gic genius and mod­ern decision-making processes under­scores the con­vic­tion which I arrived at with­out the for­mal research sup­port­ing his work. Per­haps I got there intu­itively, if you will.

Research on expert intu­ition sup­ports the notion that in urgent sit­u­a­tions, peo­ple make deci­sions by com­bin­ing analy­sis of past expe­ri­ence with a flash of insight. In the 1990s psy­chol­o­gist Gary Klein stud­ied the decision-making processes of emer­gency room nurses, fire­fight­ers and sol­diers in bat­tle. While these experts ini­tially attrib­uted their choices to intu­ition, fur­ther prob­ing revealed that they were actu­ally mak­ing rapid con­nec­tions between the sit­u­a­tion at hand and sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions stored in their memories.

Recent brain research pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence that peo­ple make deci­sions through a com­bi­na­tion of analy­sis and intu­ition. In 2000 a group of neu­ro­sci­en­tists won the Nobel Prize for a new model of the brain called intel­li­gent mem­ory, which over­turned the pre­vi­ous left-brain/right-brain model. “Basi­cally as you go through life, you’re putting things on the shelves of your brain,” says Dug­gan. “The sci­en­tists call it pars­ing; it’s tech­ni­cally analy­sis. Your brain is con­stantly com­par­ing what it’s tak­ing in to what’s already there, and when it finds a com­bi­na­tion — a syn­the­sis — you have an insight.”

After mak­ing the con­nec­tion between von Clause­witz and mod­ern sci­ence, Dug­gan defined the com­mon idea as strate­gic intu­ition: “the selec­tive pro­jec­tion of past ele­ments into the future in a new com­bi­na­tion as a course of action that might or might not fit your pre­vi­ous goals, and the per­sonal com­mit­ment to work out the details along the way.”^[4]

Dug­gan notes that “the idea that analy­sis and intu­ition take place in sep­a­rate parts of the brain and are appro­pri­ate for dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions [is based upon an out­dated view of the human mind]. In real­ity, as the new brain research shows, analy­sis and intu­ition are closely inter­twined in all sit­u­a­tions.” Still, while the recog­ni­tion and descrip­tion may be con­sid­ered recent in some cir­cles, the con­cept is not.

Strate­gic intu­ition describes how break­through ideas hap­pen in all realms of human endeavor, from busi­ness to pol­i­tics to art. “This might sound like the oppo­site of an inno­va­tion, but in a prac­ti­cal sense this is how inno­va­tion actu­ally hap­pens,” says Dug­gan. “And even in busi­ness this is an old idea — the Aus­trian econ­o­mist Joseph Schum­peter basi­cally said this in the 1940s. So it’s some­thing that we redis­cover again and again and again. I trace its ear­li­est ori­gins to the Tao Te Ching in ancient China, 450 BC.”^[5]

Duggan’s course illus­trates that a more real­is­tic sce­nario includes mul­ti­ple goals that could lead to a desired end objec­tive, rather than a sin­gle fixed one to which all plans are directly related and in a step-by-step way. In fact, his descrip­tion of the func­tion of strate­gic intu­ition strongly sup­ports the value of flex­i­ble gen­eral goals.