What is “knowing”?
Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Leadership, Management, Quantum Leaders | Leave a Comment
At a recent Quantum Leaders staff meeting, Norman broached the issue of “knowing”, that is the instances where a person appears to have an insight as to a situation, often what will happen in the future, that she cannot ascribe to particular information – e.g. she “just knows” something will happen or is the case.
We briefly discussed this, and I offered that such insights, which I would classify under the popular notion of intuition, are actually instances of pattern recognition where the person in question is mapping current circumstances against previous experiences or anecdotal knowledge, and extrapolating a similar outcome.
Norman pushed back on this, asserting that pattern recognition was a thinking process, and that what he was describing was a non-thinking, “just knowing” process. In fact, the way Norman describes it is as an almost metaphysical process where the insight/inspiration comes from some external, undefined source.
We agreed not to discuss the point further, since this would be a good topic for our first podcast and we’ll likely record our conversations on this subject at some near term point.
So what is your opinion on this issue….is “just knowing something” a function of pattern recognition (whether done consciously or unconsciously), or something different?
Gregg Gallagher
Director, Strategic Marketing & Innovation Practice
Quantum Leaders, Inc.
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