proliferate, and more children left home each day to go to school. To effectively manage education, teachers and administrators, understandably, increasingly relied upon objective tools. In particular, they increasingly relied upon tests, with right and wrong answers. The quest for the right answer became paramount. Parents bought into it, unconsciously I’m sure, in an effort to stay on top of their children’s progress without investing too much time out of their busy days. The result was that the left brain, home to the thinking process necessary to formulate a “right” answer, or to distinguish between a right and wrong answer, increased in importance vis-à-vis the right brain.
Social Conditioning
Another phenomenon of recent history is the development of a culture that discourages personal responsibility. Our governments, court systems, and religions encourage many of us to believe we are without power. Many of us believe our lives are determined by other people and forces beyond our control. With the pervasiveness of this belief, it is easy to see why we ignore and distrust this powerful driver of intuition that burns inside of us. We feel these outside forces have control over us, and they want “correct”– objectively defined and verifiable — behavior from us. We’d better provide that behavior or we will suffer.
What if I, the head of a regional office of a multinational company, closed the office one day and gave everyone a holiday because I had a gut feeling that productivity on that day, for reasons I could not quantify or even rationally explain, would be so low that it wouldn’t justify opening, or that a holiday would boost morale such that future productivity would increase