Intuition and Planning: How to lead change

We had an interesting conversation recently when discussing how to lead change through either intuition or planning, or both. The consensus seemed to be that when using intuition you are often basing that on evidence from your experiences, so that it is more calculated intuition rather than blind gut instinct.

An interesting point was raised however that if your frame of reference, for instance your job, changes then you don’t have any experience to guide your intuition. So what are you to do?

If when leading beyond authority you are crossing silos, sectors or worlds, how can you trust your instinct? What might hold true in your world might not in another, and so you need the planning and rational rigour to inform your decisions in order to be effective.

Or, as was pointed out you need to make sure that you surround yourself with people who are strong in areas where you are weak, be that they are more methodical planners, or instinctive leaders, or that they know the world you are operating in better than you.

This is a pertinent point, which has come up in a lot of discussions of late, and when I look around the workplace I see that it holds true here as well. Have you surrounded yourself with the right people? Is your network turbulent and diverse enough to allow you to transcend worlds effectively?

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