They sold cars, skin care, refrigerators, insurance, and medical research. They had held their jobs for years, even decades. Yet they all were failing. Their performance was described by their peers as below suboptimal . . . tragically hopeless . . . like a donkey trying to climb a staircase. One had sunk so far that if he tripled his commissions, he'd still rank last among his sales force.
They'd been sent to me because their companies viewed them as long past their prime. And certainly, they seemed to have exhausted their powers of growth. They slouched across the classroom and slumped into chairs, staring catatonically at the blank projector screen. When I engaged them in small talk, they became superficially jovial but turned quickly defensive. They did not like to be questioned about their jobs-or really about anything. They preferred to tell me: Sales is about relationships. They repeated this mantra over and over, drawing great comfort from it. When I asked how they cultivated relationships, they replied: Time. It takes time to cultivate relationships. You can't do it overnight.
Leaving the projector blank, I got the salespeople onto their feet. Then I led them out of the classroom and into a museum gallery. The gallery was filled with curious paintings, creatively drawn and brightly colored. I invited the salespeople to find a painting that surprised them and to study it for a few minutes. I asked them to imagine what would happen if the scene in the painting were rewound like a movie-and what would happen if it were fast-forwarded. After that, I led the salespeople back into the classroom and ran them through a ten-minute exercise. Then I sent them back to their jobs.
Two months later, I checked on how they were doing. About 40 percent were still failing or had been fired. The other 60 percent had shown improvement-strong improvement. Taken as a group, they had risen in their companies' metrics from poor to average, and several had achieved more considerable gains. One had shot to the very top of his sales team, jumping from dead last to runaway first. "The only way I can figure it," his boss remarked to me, "is that you sawed open his head and transplanted his brain."
These turnarounds prompted their companies to ask: What was the exercise I'd run? What ten-minute training had produced such a dramatic uptick in performance? But that wasn't the right question to ask. The right question was: What was the difference between the 60 percent who improved and the 40 percent who didn't?
I got the answer by asking the salespeople to draw the painting they'd selected in the museum gallery. The 40 percent recalled vague details or no details at all. The 60 percent remembered one unique detail about the painting-and remembered it with specificity. They vividly saw the detail in their imagination. And even now, after months had passed, they could still recall, often with a smile or a jolt of wonder, how strange the detail seemed.
That recall revealed: The salespeople had rediscovered a youthful power of their brain. The power of intuition.
intuition means to know without consciously thinking. What intuition knows is a hidden rule of life. That rule enables us to act in ways that no one has previously envisioned. We can solve old problems in fresh ways. We can climb upward on original ladders. We can reinvent ourselves and our world, driving growth-and even revolution.
Intuition arrives as a flash of insight. In fact, it arrives so fast that it can feel supernatural. Medieval theologians saw it as a holy revelation. Nineteenth-century transcendentalists claimed it as a vision of the soul. Modern Jungians (and Myers-Briggs enthusiasts) view it as a mystical perception. Yet intuition has an entirely natural source, as I discover from studying U.S. Army Special Operators.
Operators have a significantly higher rate of intuition than the average Army recruit, and that rate increases over their career. They have learned to activate intuition, often with remarkable results. They can see minutes, hours, days ahead, anticipating possibilities that no one else detects.
I log hundreds of these acts of intuition during my research with the Army. Most involve recent events, so they can't be disclosed. But here's a characteristic example from 2003.
In March of that year, half a million U.S. soldiers invaded Iraq. The invasion went to plan. Indeed, it went so exactly to plan that in just forty-two days, on May 1, the U.S. declared victory against Iraq's deposed ruler, Saddam Hussein. Three weeks earlier, however, a U.S. Special Operator had been walking through a quiet Baghdad suburb, its wooden-latticed mansions gently flanked by palm trees, when . . .
I saw an Iraqi on a bridge. And he spoke better English than I speak. Better American English than I speak.
Surprised by this singular fact, the Operator struck up a conversation.
The Iraqi said: "Listen, we could not be more happy that you're here. I am the engineering department head at Mosul University. I lived in Boston for twenty years. I received all of my education at Harvard. We absolutely are glad that you're here. Nobody, nobody liked Saddam Hussein. But if you don't get the power back on, and the hospitals open, and the water flowing, the groceries flowing, trade flowing, fast, then you will never get control of what's coming."
The Operator reported this to his command, warning: "Our plan has failed. We have lost the war." Shortly afterward, the president of the United States stood on an aircraft carrier to announce the opposite: Mission Accomplished. The Operator had seen so far into tomorrow that his own government wouldn't catch up for years.
The Operator's intuition can seem divinely inspired-or extremely lucky. But it has the same real-world source as every other intuition that I log. The source is: exceptional information.
Exceptional information is defined by the U.S. Army in the manual Mission Command:
There is information that results from an extraordinary event, an unseen opportunity, or a new threat. This is exceptional information-specific and immediately vital information that directly affects the success of the current operation. . . . Identifying exceptional information requires initiative.
In other words, exceptional information is an exception to a rule. Like a warm-blooded reptile or a rainbow at night, it violates the known laws of its environment, revealing that more can happen than precedent suggests.
This seeing beyond precedent is the opposite of how intuition is logically defined by behavioral economists such as Daniel Kahneman. Following the lead of computer AI pioneer Herbert Simon, Kahneman states in Thinking, Fast and Slow that "intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." Recognition is a pattern match, a visual precedent reiterated in the present. As construed by logic, intuition is thus the identification of a nonexception.
Exceptional information demonstrates the contrary: Intuition detects a rupture in a standard narrative, driving a break with the past. To make that break, we need what the Army manual calls initiative, which is another way of saying running ahead of data. AI can't do this-and while our brain can, it generally doesn't. It has been conditioned by the logic of modern life to feel that it's smarter to function like an algorithm, sticking to patterns and dismissing exceptions as noise. Yet the potential reward for acting on exceptions is enormous. Exceptional information hints at a new rule that can shift the whole world's story. It's a blip-until it changes everything.
In the case of Baghdad 2003, the exceptional information was the Iraqi on the bridge. Previously, the rule of the U.S. invasion had been We're bringing America to Iraq. But here was an Iraqi who spoke American better than Americans! Here was an Iraqi who'd used his U.S. education to engineer cancer hospitals and electronic banking! Here was an Iraqi who'd quietly launched his own American invasion-a more forward-thinking one! His example alone, without requiring a single other fact, was enough to alert the Operator: More possibilities-good and bad-exist in this place than our rule can predict.
Exceptional information is everywhere in war, because combat shatters existing laws of action. And exceptional information is everywhere else too. No human environment-business, culture, politics-ever stays the same. The better we get at detecting the exceptional, the more our brain can intuit new possibilities for art, science, and technology, as we can see from Vincent van Gogh, Marie Curie, and the Apple computer.
Copyright © 2025 by Angus Fletcher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
