“Slowly but surely the tables are being turned on the ‘organization man,’” heralded Dun's Review and Modern Industry in 1966.Footnote 58 The business world was entering the “age of the intuitive manager,” a new type of leader who relied not on established procedures or analytical reasoning, but on the “visionary and anticipatory qualities” of intuition.Footnote 59 Once credited with economic prosperity, bureaucratic management structures—and the “organization men” who populated them—were now perceived as stifling innovation and impeding information flows.Footnote 60 Management's overreliance on careful planning, established procedures, and authoritarian lines of hierarchy no longer sufficed in the competitive, complex, and ever-changing business climate of the late twentieth century. The article urged corporations to overcome their skepticism of intuition, to recognize the “reason and order in intuitive judgment,” and to structure their organization to allow for the emergence of the intuitive manager, who would spearhead organizational renewal.Footnote 61 Dun's Review’s proclamation was a prescient one; by the late 1970s and 1980s, intuition was widely regarded by leading authorities as an essential management trait.Footnote 62
At first, however, champions of intuitive management faced skepticism from business leaders, who tended to see intuition as mysterious, unexplainable, or overly emotional.Footnote 63 As management writer Harold Leavitt noted, one could not expect to be taken seriously talking about “hunches and gut feelings—not until you can index them.”Footnote 64 Proponents of intuitive management developed an arsenal of techniques, from personality tests and brain scans to creativity seminars and assessment centers, to measure, and in turn cultivate, intuition. Psychological tests, by making intuition measurable, helped consultants overcome business skepticism and convert intuition into a legitimate form of managerial reasoning. To understand the emergence of intuitive management, I examine the adoption of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) across different spaces, from creativity research and neuroscience to corporate training seminars.
The version of intuition spread by these consultants and psychologists, referring to a conglomerate of perceptual, affective, and cognitive processes, was not always consistent or coherent.Footnote 65 However, discussions of managerial intuition shared a commitment to explicate intuition in rational terms, describing it as a mode of rapid, unconscious, nonlinear information processing that holistically perceived patterns in masses of data and resulted in decisions oriented to the future and the big picture.Footnote 66 They explained intuition not as a mysterious or mystical process, but as a necessary cognitive mode for the knowledge worker.Footnote 67 By examining how scientific research and psychological techniques converged with business concerns about technology and innovation, I unpack how the “intuitive manager” became an ideal type for governing in a knowledge economy.
Measuring Intuition
You open the test booklet, no. 2 pencil in hand, and face hundreds of short questions that, answered honestly, will indicate how you perceive the world and make decisions. Scanning the questions, you notice recurring patterns, asking if you prefer theories or facts, abstract ideas or concrete experience, possibilities or actualities. You jot down your responses, recalling the assurance of the test directions that there are “no wrong answers”; you tally your answers with the guide provided and are told you have a preference for “intuition.” One week later, flipping through a trade journal or business magazine, you encounter a quiz that asks you to circle particular boxes if you “believe that a logical step-by-step method is best for solving problems” or, conversely, if you “rely on intuitive hunches and the feeling of ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ when moving towards the solution of a problem.”Footnote 68 It is through these kinds of tests, featured in trade journals or given at management training seminars, that managers encountered intuition. The tests went by dozens of acronyms—the AIM, the HBDI, the HIP—but by far the most well-known measure of intuition was the MBTI.
The MBTI was a general personality test that assigned each individual a “type” based on four scales: extraversion/introversion, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving, and most importantly for this paper, intuition/sensing. The MBTI's version of intuition drew on the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose 1922 Psychological Types described intuition as a form of unconscious perception of the realm of images, symbols, ideas, and abstractions.Footnote 69 Its opposite was sensing: perception of the empirical world through the five senses. Intuitive people—in contrast to “sensors”—preferred abstract ideas over concrete facts, potentialities over actualities, future over present, and holistic over sequential decision making.Footnote 70 According to this theory, everyone had a dominant mode of perception, either intuition or sensing, which was their most comfortable and natural way of perceiving the world. First developed by amateur psychologist Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s and 1950s, the MBTI was adopted by researchers in creativity, brain lateralization, and decision making from the 1960s to the 1980s. As this paper will show, these three zones were all important sites for the development of techniques for studying intuition. By the 1980s, the MBTI had found its most enthusiastic audience in corporate America due to its ability to distill complex psychological ideas into a straightforward description of intuition that had practical implications.Footnote 71 But before arriving at corporate America, let us turn to an early site where attributes of intuition were articulated: creativity research.
Candidates arrive at a converted fraternity house on the Berkeley campus of the University of California for a long weekend. From the first morning to the final evening, they are subjected to a barrage of interviews, simulations, and psychological tests—including the MBTI, or what one subject called a “distressing questionnaire” by “two Jungian ladies.”Footnote 72 After a day of testing, interviews, and games, the subjects come together for dinner and cocktails, still under the watchful eye of participant-observer psychologists who will later turn test scores and scribbled notes into candidate profiles. The participants are gathered from various professions across the arts and sciences, from poets to mathematicians, but apparently sharing one trait in common: creativity. This vignette describes a method developed at Berkeley's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) in the 1950s to study the successful creative personality. IPAR's roots, like much of twentieth-century psychology, lay in World War II, when the Office of Strategic Services commissioned psychologists Donald MacKinnon and Henry Murray to develop methods for officer selection.Footnote 73 Their assessment center method, which included a battery of psychological tests, was soon transported to corporations as a method for assessing job candidates and potential managers.Footnote 74
Importantly, IPAR was one of the first adopters of the MBTI for psychological research, finding particular value in the intuition scale.Footnote 75 Although they distinguished creativity from intuition, IPAR researchers found a high correlation between the two qualities, particularly as measured by the MBTI scale.Footnote 76 At a conference run by MBTI publishers, IPAR psychologist Harrison Gough reported interesting results about the distribution of intuition types among creative people.Footnote 77 Intuition, usually the rarer mode of perception in the general population (found in 25 percent of people), was preferred by 90 percent of creative personalities across a range of professions. Creative people, the studies found, reveled in paradox, ambiguity, potentiality, and complexity—the precise forms of perception associated with intuition. As Gough noted, “The person scoring high on [intuition] favors fantasy and the abstract to factuality and the concrete, likes imaginative more than sober-minded people, values possibilities more than probabilities, and prefers theories to facts.”Footnote 78 In addition to scoring highly on intuition scales, creative people were more likely to prefer complex figures to simple figures and more likely to display independence of judgment—and therefore were less likely to subscribe to conformist ways of thought.Footnote 79 Creativity and intuition were thus both defined in opposition to conformity, a topic of acute social and scientific concern in post–World War II America.Footnote 80
The theories of creativity and techniques developed to study the creative personality at IPAR helped bring the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the attention of psychologists and management researchers.Footnote 81 The first large-scale empirical study of managerial intuition using the MBTI in the 1980s was conducted by consultant Weston Agor, who administered the intuition scale to over two thousand managers across corporate and government organizations.Footnote 82 Psychological tests, he suggested, were particularly helpful in launching conversations about intuition among managers who might be more familiar with analytic methods. Agor found preference for intuition to be correlated with higher positions on the management hierarchy; for him, this served as evidence that top managers attained their position because of intuition.Footnote 83 Intuitive leaders were visionary leaders, able to see the big picture and to mobilize people in accordance with their vision, but ill suited for detail-oriented, routine tasks. Throughout his writings in popular magazines and business journals, Agor consistently argued that intuition had a logic of its own and an importance as a form of creative decision making that was ideal for the knowledge economy.Footnote 84 In the next section, we will see how consultants such as Agor claimed that intuition could be cultivated among managers.
Training Intuition
Although the MBTI framed intuition as an individual personality trait, consulting psychologists claimed that intuitive problem solving was a universal mode of reasoning that could be taught through training seminars.Footnote 85 Psychological tests, including the MBTI and adapted variants of it, were a key part of these seminars. Agor, for example, offered programs in “brain skill management” that cultivated intuition at both the individual and organizational levels. As a name like “brain skill management” suggests, such courses drew on the cultural cachet and scientific prestige of neuroscience. Most frequently cited was Nobel Prize–winning research into brain lateralization, which showed that distinct forms of information processing took place in the right and left hemispheres of the brain.Footnote 86 The “right brain”—posited as the seat of nonanalytical, holistic thought—became almost synonymous with intuition in management literature.Footnote 87 Taking up the language of neuroscience and of the MBTI was the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), a tool created in the late 1970s by Ned Herrmann, former training director at General Electric to measure hemispheric preference.Footnote 88 Like the MBTI, the HBDI was based on the notion that everyone has a dominant cognitive style, discernable through the questionnaire, that influences career choices and aptitude; through training, however, people were able to acquire the cognitive traits of their weaker hemisphere. And as Herrmann argued, creativity and good management alike demanded the ability to tap into different cognitive modes and attain “whole brain thinking.” Intuitive problem solving, in this model, entailed an iterative tacking back and forth between hemispheres: the intuitive manager was one who had the ability to integrate the right hemisphere's “intuitive flash” with the left hemisphere's analytic ability to implement this intuitive insight.Footnote 89
By the mid-1980s, consulting firm Herrmann International had administered the HBDI to hundreds of thousands of workers at corporations including Shell, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, American Express, Microsoft, and AT&T.Footnote 90 Activities at seminars included problem-solving tasks, where groups were formed based on HBDI scores. One particularly evocative training seminar took place at a lakeside retreat attended by Shell executives who sought to develop a new corporate strategy. Participants were asked to build a physical model of their problem using wood, wire, and feathers; they then rowed to the middle of a lake, to generate metaphors from nature, and then hiked to overlook the lake, to get a new perspective, before remodeling their problem with fresh eyes.Footnote 91 Executives, once trained in intuition, would return to their companies with novel insight into problems and new strategies for structuring the organization.Footnote 92
Intuition, though an individual mode of perception, required organizational restructuring to be elicited. Proponents of intuitive management advocated for a relaxed, collaborative, participative, and communicative managerial style supported by a flexible organizational structure that tolerated complexity, messiness, and even chaos.Footnote 93 Consultants urged corporations to use psychological test scores as the basis for reorganizing teams, cutting across traditional department lines to mix different cognitive styles: intuitive managers would brainstorm ideas, whose practicality could be assessed by more linear-thinking managers.Footnote 94 The result would be, as Herrmann put it, a “composite whole brain staff, which then has the capability of synergy within the organization.”Footnote 95 Agor suggested that intuition training was especially important in organizations with limited resources due to budget shortages, downsizing, or outsourcing, as it allowed companies to extract more productivity out of existing employees—like public-sector organizations. The intuitive human mind, Agor declared, “is potentially the most important single resource an organization has for its present and future survival”—a resource that, if properly cultivated, could serve as a “boundless source of enhanced productivity.”Footnote 96 Moreover, as we will see in the final section, proponents of intuitive management argued that intuition was particularly important in knowledge work, where productivity was defined in mental, rather than physiological, terms.Footnote 97
Information Processing
As I have shown, proponents of intuitive management sought to legitimize intuition by grounding it in neuroscientific research and psychological techniques. Psychological tests like the MBTI, by making intuition measurable and commensurable, helped consultants overcome business skepticism about its ineffable nature. But to understand how intuitive management came to prominence, one must widen one's scope to the broader economic context of late-twentieth-century America. Intuition's purchase in corporate America is connected to a variety of cultural and economic factors, ranging from the influence of countercultural movements and humanistic psychology, which popularized alternative modes of consciousness, to the older tradition of human relations management, which emphasized the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of work.Footnote 98 One salient context for the turn to intuitive management was the widespread conviction that America was entering the knowledge or information economy. The editors of Intuition at Work even proclaimed that 1975 marked the inauguration of the “intuition industry”—an age defined by “the replacement of mind over matter and brute strength as the primary economic resource.”Footnote 99 Intuition was framed as a mode of cognition particularly suited for the knowledge economy.
Proponents of intuitive management challenged the dominance of analytic and quantitative reasoning methods in business, a legacy of management science's roots in military planning and operations research.Footnote 100 The analytic approach to problem solving entailed breaking down problems into their components, searching for operational decision rules, and ordering alternatives in a consistent, logical fashion to arrive at the optimal decision.Footnote 101 New cognitive science research into heuristics and biases in reasoning levied several critiques against this model, namely, that it assumed resources (of information, time, money, and cognitive capacity) that did not exist.Footnote 102 Noted management theorist Herbert Simon treated intuition as a heuristic that humans used to cope with their inherent constraints on information processing—their “bounded rationality.”Footnote 103 Intuition was a cognitive, although unconscious, process, which used pattern recognition and past experience to make a rapid decision, without following a logical, sequential order.Footnote 104 The paradigmatic example of intuition for Simon was a chess master, who was able to quickly decide on a move in a complex board, without consciously performing all the calculations that would be required to logically deduce the correct play.
Cognitive science research into decision making in the 1980s is one zone where intuition became legitimized, not as a personality trait, but as a universal form of information processing that had a legitimate and important role in management.Footnote 105 As James McKenney and Peter Kean argued in a Harvard Business Review article, intuition was well situated for decision making in situations either with too much or not enough data or with environmental uncertainty—for example, forecasting consumer tastes.Footnote 106 Far from a mysterious or sloppy method, intuition had an “underlying discipline at least as coherent as the systematic mode.”Footnote 107
It is not coincidental that the language of information processing emerged at a moment of the widespread introduction of computing into corporations, one of the most salient contexts for the turn to intuition.Footnote 108 Computers raised theoretical and practical questions for cognitive scientists and management theorists alike about which capacities were uniquely human and which could be outsourced to machines. Computers produced endless data and models, which had to be integrated into corporate decision-making structures; whole new professions (IT specialists) emerged, while other jobs were taken over by computers, including many of the procedural tasks posited as the antithesis to intuition.Footnote 109 As Bregje van Eekelen argues, the history of creativity must be understood in relation to the history of automation: “Thinking outside the box was what computers and assembly lines couldn't do.”Footnote 110 So too must we understand the history of intuitive management, which promised that the human mind was uniquely capable of deciphering patterns in masses of information. Intuitive management called for a labor of visionary leadership that could not be outsourced to computers or clerical staff.
