The sentient intelligence gap

Years ago, when I was the director of a strategic design MBA program, I would invite business leaders to join our graduate students over dinner and conversation. Inevitably, there was a moment in the recounting of their origin story when these successful leaders would reference a significant crossroads that required some major decision making. But they didn’t reference rationale and logic. Instead, they mused that “something told me not to do the deal” or “something told me to work with Lucy instead of Jim, even though Lucy didn’t have as impressive a pedigree.” We tend to call that something instinct. I like to encapsulate those critical intuitive moments as the times when our sentient intelligence rises to the fore. We are all equipped with sentient intelligence. It’s our superpower. I think of sentient intelligence as a collection of sensory and emotional navigational tools that we humans use to make sense of the world around us. It helps us to extract meaning from signals in our environments by way of our physical senses (e.g., sight, sound and touch) and through our emotional console. We are equipped with bodily sensations, emotional cues and the brain’s default mode network …