My Ways of Knowing

Empirical Science

Empirical science builds knowledge through the scientific method: a question is turned into a falsifiable hypothesis, one that observation could prove wrong,¹ then checked systematically, measured, replicated and reviewed by peers. In quantitative research, statistics decide whether a result is significant, that is, unlikely to be due to chance alone. What survives holds beyond the single case, because it no longer depends on any one person’s subjective perception. I read this research closely and weigh what it genuinely supports. What I look for there is not research for its own sake, but what can be turned into a concept, a framework or a working maxim.

I see science as a means, not an end. It enters the work as an input, and what counts is whether it makes the person in front of me more effective in this particular situation.

Direct Experience

Science deliberately sets the individual aside to find what holds for many. Direct experience works the other way round: it is knowledge from the inside, lived first-hand in a particular situation, with mind, feelings and body. It does not generalize in the same way, but it reaches a depth and specificity that no average can. In 1:1 coaching, this is highly relevant.

For me it consists of my own observations and the lessons I have learned along the way, including what I have witnessed in the people closest to me. I pass it on as instructive stories and cases. I am a convinced believer in storytelling, because a story carries an insight into a person in a way that a finding rarely does.

Intuition

Intuition is the most elusive of the three and probably the most controversial. I distinguish two kinds. The first is expert intuition: accumulated experience that recognizes a pattern before conscious thought has caught up. It is well researched. Daniel Kahneman counts it among the fast, automatic processes he calls System 1, whose shortcuts also produce the familiar cognitive biases. Together with Gary Klein, he showed when expert intuition can be trusted: in fields regular enough to learn from, after long practice with clear feedback.² Studies of senior executives find that intuition enters a large share of their important decisions, often more than they admit, and that in fast-changing environments it goes along with better company performance.³

The second kind does not draw on one’s own experience at all. It is the sense of tapping into a non-local knowing that reaches beyond the individual. Carl Gustav Jung tried to capture it with the idea of a collective unconscious, and others have carried the thought much further since: the physicist David Bohm with his implicate order, an underlying wholeness from which separate things unfold, and the systems philosopher Ervin László with a field that holds and connects information across everything that exists.⁴ László builds on solid ground: Ilya Prigogine showed that open systems do not simply run down, but can organize themselves into ever greater complexity. The step from there to a shared, non-local knowing is an interpretation, not a finding. It can, however, become a matter of direct experience.

This kind of intuition matters most where experience cannot help, for instance when a decision concerns something that has not happened yet. Science cannot confirm it, and I do not claim that it does.

I have always had an intuitive streak, and over the years it has become increasingly important in my work. I have deliberately deepened my access to it, not least through yoga, because intuition speaks strongly through the body.

Whatever its source, an insight reaches the client in the same way: in conversation, as a question, an impulse, a scientific finding, a story or a framework.

1 Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung (1934); in English, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).

2 Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree”, American Psychologist 64 (2009); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).

3 Naresh Khatri and H. Alvin Ng, “The Role of Intuition in Strategic Decision Making”, Human Relations 53 (2000); Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy (2014).

4 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980); Ervin László, Science and the Akashic Field (2004); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos (1984).