Michael Rennie, Board Member and Consultant
Michael Rennie is Board Member and Consultant.
Michael is a person who is very aware of intuition and uses it actively in his daily life. He expanded on this subject relating how intuition fits into the overall mode of thinking in his view:
I have come to realise that there are a number of different modes of thinking. There is a logical mode of thinking where you can sit down and work through all the pieces, which is a lot of what we do here [at McKinsey]. Then there is inductive and deductive thinking within that. We get trained a lot in those different thinking modes and how to communicate that to clients — that is a big part of the model here.
There is also feeling, and the more you come to realise that thinking is not just analytical/rational — [it] rather has an irrational and feeling component to it. So I have learnt to be quite sensitive to what I am feeling, when I am thinking, because the feeling comes first, often, and actually creates the thoughts. All the research seems to support that.
You start to realise that there is analytical logic and feeling. And there is an aspect of feeling, which can often be very logical and it actually directs you.
So when you go, “why am I feeling this?”, it actually directs you towards certain logic, or it can appear illogical and you can’t work out in the moment why you are feeling that. There is something going on that you need to be aware of, or take account of, and there is a deeper form of thinking. I call it intuition or knowingness. The way I think about it is very much a physics analogy. We have a Newtonian world of physics, which is large objects that move very slowly — zero to 200 cycles per second, and then you have the world of the quantum, which is very small objects moving at 500,000 cycles per second, and everything is operating in a quantum reality.
You then go into the deeper side, that there is actually, information. And everything that is happening is actually recorded as information in the quantum through wave action and theory. There is a way in which you can tap into the quantum. The logical is very much at the Newtonian level, and there is a quantum level of thinking, which is intuition. For me it is about tapping into the field of quantum energy — so how does that work?
It’s like a ‘U’. I did a lot of work with people like Otto Scharmerii, who has developed the Theory of U, when I was working in the States. It is a nice way of thinking about it. Essentially, the key to intuitive thinking, to me, is the physiology — three bodies — the physical, mental and emotional.
You have a physical body, the lungs, mental–emotional brain and nervous system. The feeling part of it - thinking - is happening in the emotional body, and then it is coming into the physical body as action, or the stimulus is coming from the emotional body. And there is a third body, which is an energetic body.
The key is how you tap into the third body, and the way you tap into that is essentially for me a two-prong process –— the first is that you have got to intimately connect yourself with the subject matter, essentially you have got to be in it, intimately.
Once you are deeply in it, it’s like the veils between the worlds — you have got to go into it, and there is a point at which you sort of let go into it, and you wait for what comes — it is like a small voice that comes to you.