Primal Intelligence: A New Science of Leadership Training
Sixteen billion dollars. That’s what US corporations spend annually on leadership training, the bulk of it provided by business schools and private-ed consultancies such as Korn Ferry and the Center for Creative Leadership.
Yet, despite that vast capital investment, the training doesn’t reliably produce leaders. This year, when I surveyed senior Human Resources executives—chief people officers, head learning officers, VPs of talent—at Fortune 100s across healthcare, sales, finance, food service, manufacturing, tech, and biotech, they gave the training high marks for teaching management skills but flunked it for cultivating leadership.
One CPO said, “While it produces a bump in our execs’ belief that they can lead, it doesn’t give them any deep sense of how to improve their leadership abilities.” Another CPO told me, “I regard it less as talent development than talent retention. It makes employees feel like we’re investing in [their leadership potential].” A third said, “It hasn’t evolved much since the days when Warren Bennis pointed out [in a series of HBR articles from the 1961 “A Revisionist Theory of Leadership” to the 2005 “How Business Schools Lost Their Way”] that classic business training elevated management over leadership.” In general, the HR execs agreed that the lack of effective training perpetuated the myth that leadership skills are innate to some people not others. “Which is unfortunate, because most leaders will tell you they had to learn to lead. But there don’t seem to be organizations out there that know how to teach it.”
As I suggest in my new book, Primal Intelligence, however, there is in fact an organization that knows how to teach leadership. That organization is US Army Special Operations.
Army Special Operations evolved within the same institution that inspired Bennis, who derived many of his leadership insights from his time as a World War II infantry officer. In the decades after Bennis left military service, Army Special Operations has devised a series of training pipelines, centered at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School in North Carolina, that nurture original thinking, strategic vision, entrepreneurial initiative, and other leadership skills. To learn how, my Ohio State lab spent three years working closely with Army Special Operations, guided by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Gaines; by active-duty US Army Operators such as Sergeant Major Matt Jackson; by JFK Special Warfare Center and School training exercise commanders such as Lieutenant Colonel Christopher J. Haviley; and by senior Special Ops cognitive trainers such as Dr. Brittany Loney. Together, we determined that the Special Ops curriculum targets four brain processes referred to collectively as Primal Intelligence.
Primal Intelligence evolved millions of years ago to guide our ancestors through the volatility and murk of life. We’re born knowing it but unlearn it in modern educational institutions. And it is mechanically impossible for computer AI.
The four processes of Primal Intelligence are:
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Intuition. Misunderstood by modern logicians as pattern-matching, intuition involves spotting what Operators call “exceptional information,” or in other words, exceptions to rules. Intuition detects emergent opportunities, making it the source of plans.
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Imagination. Misunderstood by modern organizational psychologists as ideation, imagination involves narrative processes such as causal and counterfactual thinking. Imagination extends opportunities into branching possibilities, making it a tool for multiplying plans.
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Commonsense. Misunderstood by modern computer scientists as a form of inference, commonsense is impossible for computers because it requires the nonlogical operations that drive anxiety in the human brain. Commonsense matches the newness of our actions to the newness of the situation, making it a tool for selecting plans.
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Emotion. Misunderstood by modern management theorists as a tool for knowing others (through empathy or EQ), emotion instead evolved in the brain to assess our own performance. Emotion tells us when our current behaviors are encountering difficulties, making it a tool for sustaining plans.
In Primal Intelligence, I provide a method, originating in US Army Special Operations and tested in Fortune 500s, for improving these four processes. I explain how they drive innovation, decision-making, resilience, communication, and other skills. I detail the science of why they will never be performed by computer AI. And I describe how they combine to form leaders.
For an introduction to the method and a personalized assessment of your own Primal Intelligence, try the free diagnostic.
