Question

Barbara Carper introduced ways of knowing in 1978 and the description involves intuitive, empirical, ethical, and esthetic knowing. All revolving around learned knowledge and gut feelings.

Discussion questions

Examine your own intuitive process and describe your ways of knowing. Give examples of intuitive moments

Answer 1

There are so many kinds of intuition - heuristics and biases, gut feelings, insight (or the aha! effect), psychic intuition and philosophical intuition. Each is quite different, and comes from a different place. A common use of the word intuition is “gut feeling”. Gut feeling is a feeling that comes to you on presentation of a context, thing or person. The most common of those is when you meet a person. I interviewed Australia's top leaders. Many of them said that intuition was most prevalent when selecting people for a role, and this is significant, because they also said that picking people and placing them was one of their most important functions. Here are examples.

I was one of the board‐panel that was interviewing for a new CEO. I wasn't chair, I was the deputy chair. And the person came in and they were interviewed and there were saying all the right stuff, but something was telling me this guy wasn't the right one ... And at the end of it I said, I can't tell you why, and I’ll say to you it's not if, but when this person fails we're going to have to move quickly. And I said to them at the time that is just my intuition telling me that this is the wrong person. I have nothing to substantiate it because on paper this person looks fine. They hired this person and unfortunately he had to be removed fairly soon afterwards.