Art and engineering. Intuition and intelligence. Heart and mind. It’s at the intersections that our future manifests.
Lately in entrepreneurship, design, and social innovation there’s a definite leaning toward the rational side of this balance. A big part of that is the availability of measurable data. Because if we can measure, we can test. We can optimize. We can iterate. We can improve.
This is good.
The ‘irrational’ side of things on the other hand taps into another set of data. The data from the fullness of human experience… the data from each individual’s life full of experiences. It’s the data that informs our intuition for where to head and our instinct for what to do.
This too, is good.
Good however, is not great. On their own, the rational is doomed to incrementalism just as the irrational is doomed to irrelevance. Perhaps that’s why, in the face of the rational movement I’m beginning to hear more about ‘getting rid of the experts‘.
Without the irrational, we’ll never find ourselves doing anything great and without the rational, we’ll never make much of our greatest opportunities. They go hand-in-hand. No substitutions allowed.