How to Fine-Tune Your Intuition

Created by Till Teenck for the Noun Project

In his new chronicle of The Container Store’s past and present, Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives , Chairman and CEO Kip Tindell devotes an entire chapter to the concept of intuition.

Principle Six of The Container Store’s seven foundational principles is “Intuition does not come to an unprepared mind. You need to train before it happens.” In Tindell’s company, the cultivation of intuition translates to a robust training program for all employees from building maintenance personnel up to VPs. The Container Store trains its full-time people almost 300 hours in their first year, then additional hours day in and day out throughout their career. The retail industry average, says Tindell, is eight hours all told.

The justification for all this (expensive, time-consuming) training is Tindell’s firm belief in the power of intuition, and the absolute necessity of knowledge and experience to make that intuition possible. Container Store employees use their intuition to divine what a customer’s true needs are, to gauge whether or not a candidate is the right hire, and to channel their creativity to come up with interesting solutions to problems.

Tindell recounts a story that has stuck with him since he read it in 1986:

One day, Einstein was sitting on a train that wasn’t moving. As another train moved past, he felt as if he were moving backward. It’s an experience most of us have had. But unlike the rest of us, Einstein used the experience, in a flash of intuition, to help him conceive the theory that would change our entire understanding of the universe. Einstein wouldn’t have had this insight if he hadn’t spent his whole life studying physics and mathematics. In other words, Einstein was prepared to have this breakthrough observation.

Intuition is a strong instinct, crucial to creative discovery. Your intuition tells you whether or not you’re working with the right partner, whether or not a design looks or feels right, and whether or not you’re approaching burnout. But Tindell’s takeaway is that you have to fine-tune your intuition before it will be useful to you:

The better you are at something—whether it’s dancing, playing the violin, or Man in the Desert Selling [The Container Store's sales philosophy]—the more reliable, brilliant, and touched by genius your intuition will be. I’ve been fly-fishing all my life. So if I’m teaching you to fly-fish, and I intuitively think there’s a trout under that rock, there probably is. If you’ve never fished before and you think there’s a trout under that rock, there probably isn’t.

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