The rational use of intuition

In the near future I will indulge in an old habit: giving seminars on Management and Intuition. I remember the first time I did that with a colleague. We were curious about the evaluations afterwards. After all, intuition is a slippery subject for managers who usually pride themselves on being rational. We relaxed when we saw the scores, but I was really surprised when I realized that the highest score was on an item I didn't expect at all: practical applicability.
Yes, intuition is immensely practical, though we can misapply it. Enthusiasts think it is a highway to infallible judgement. Well, it isn't.
Intuition is the general label for getting thoughts without knowing how we get them. Rational thinking or, better, intellectual thinking is transparent: we deal with information and with argumentation. We can check that, we can evaluate that. Intuition is immediate. I have often compared our intellect to a plodding, pretty reliable housewife an intuition to a femme fatale: highly attractive, but not too trustworthy. Yet, intellectual analysis also leads often astray and intuition may be spot on - as many men discovered after not listening to their wives.
A blog is no place to expand on how to use intuition, but pointers may be derived from understanding what it is. Intuitive flashes have five sources:

1. Experience: we often react immediately because we have encountered very many similar situations; also without analysis we may appraise fast and pretty sure what we meet.
2. Subconscious perception: this is the kind of intuition in which women on the average score higher than men; besides the focus of our attention we register many other weaker signals. Concentration is a virtue, but not overdoing that also is virtue. This is about picking up the non-verbal signals of speakers, grasping the atmosphere of a meeting, etc.
3. Incubated insight: after fruitlessly pondering and analyzing deeply, we sleep on it, and suddenly the answer pops up. This is the in psychology well-known Aha-Erlebnis.
4. Subconscious association: this is where intuition usually goes wrong. A man gives us the creeps and we don't know why. He resembles uncle Albert, who was a creep, but we don't realize the resemblance, we just get a bad feeling.
5. Psychic impressions: whatever they are, they are related to a part of our brain going into the very slow delta-rhythm. Telepathy seems to be in  this zone.

Intuition has also precursors: emergent feelings, instinctive responses.
Intuition may precede rational analysis (this is something we should look into), it may end rational analysis (we are ready to take a decision). Making intuition more explicit and more hygienic (less associations, less quasi-intellectual arguments) helps us to become more rational, not less.

Banks back to bankers

Money is our defense against poverty and threat of poverty. Money is the gate to prosperity, luxury and power. Earning, administering and spending money are matters of grave concern for most people. Where appetite for money and appetite for risk-taking combine, we get speculation. Human nature being what it is, we should accept that. Speculators are there, they will stay and they fulfill a function. Like predators in the food chain. Now they act like they own the place. Casino capitalism is the financial system being hijacked (again) by the speculators. Speculators are very clever. And very dumb at the same time. They hunt in flocks, they copy-cat and they live by the day. There is one group of people more money-wise than the speculators: their traders. They get ample bonuses when they gain, they pay nothing when they lose.
There is a simple solution to the public indignation of bonuses and a large part of the volatility of the financial markets: pay bonuses of any size, but pay them in company stock, not in stock options, and pay them in stock that can only be sold after five years, even when people have left the company before. Bank people should become co-owners. Even if bank managers and bank staff owe only a few percent of the stock, all shareholders will know it is in their interest to have good dividends and stock appreciation on the long run. Employee-ownership should go by a foundation managing the stock and giving certificates to the employees. Employees who need cash, can always borrow with the stock as a collateral, but the durability of the stock-ownership will make for a conservative appreciation.
We can trust bankers when they play with their own money, with slow money. Today, the traders and many bankers earn better than the investors and speculators they serve, and certainly much better than the shareholders they are supposed to serve.
When bankers depend on the longer-term value of their stock, we don't need to establish minimum capital requirements. Their own interest will take care of that.
Now regular stock-owning is less attractive tax-wise. So the 'best' people may leave. Let them. They probably go to your competitor. So the knife cuts both ways.

Of course, separation between retail banking and commercial banking is a good thing. And the compulsive overspending of governments has to be bridled. European countries shed crocodile tears about their national sovereignty weakened by a new pact. When you can still decide how you earn your money and what you spend it on, but you are limited in your overspending, is your personal sovereignty affected? Not at all. Only money junkies could complain.