What is augmented intuition?

It's a philosophy, a tool, a platform, and a means to expanding our intuitive abilities as human beings.

We drive this approach because:

1. Throughout history change has happened through leaps of imagination, where human beings believed the impossible wasn't.

2. Creative thinking can be hit and miss, however, so with our approach we want to deliver reliably unpredictable thinking.

3. This will affect the future of humanity.

4. This will save the day, whatever crisis next hits us.

5. This will save our communities, our colleagues, friends and families, and our businesses.

6. In this way, we not only protect our bottom lines, but ensure they can expand and build on our organisation's latent and always intrinsic intellectual property: the in-house ideas people are paid to have but which rarely get captured or validated.

Augmented intuition is an approach more than anything. We can expand our intuitive capabilities in many ways. To do this, we don't need to use tech — although tech used wisely and appropriately can be immensely useful to this end.

Whether we brainstorm with paper, have a meeting in the same room, discuss around the water-cooler, or simply send out emails, we are attempting all the time to expand the reach of our intuitive thinking.

By the by, other ways of describing such thinking include:

• arational thinking — that sweet spot between rational and irrational

• high-level domain expertise — when we as domain specialists know on what basis our mission-critical decisions are being taken, even if no one else understands exactly the "how" of our conclusions

• thinking without thinking — ever driven safely and speedily from A to B, without needing to concentrate on where you're going?

Although we are solution agnostic, and it's quite possible that if together we both sat down and examined the current state of intuition and high-level domain expertise capture and validation in your organisation, we would find you could already begin to tweak existing procedures and dynamics, it's also true that we do have a technological solution.

This solution exists, and is available to all.

It's available so you can better upscale the impact of the improvements we propose, when we look to channel more efficiently your organisation's existing, innate intellectual property and ideas.

How, then, is it done?

First, we need to understand that it's not enough — in these augmented intuition dynamics we are describing — to capture better the ideas and intuition everyone has, every day of the week. We also must work out how to validate such intellectual property.

There's no point in learning how to share something much better if — at the same time — you have no idea whether what you are sharing is true.

They say you shouldn't start by explaining the tech. On the other hand, this is page 3. We haven't started with the tech at all.

But we are all well-educated people by now. We probably have — in all human history — the most educated, certainly the most self-taught, generations of all ages currently treading this rock.

So let's be adult and educated about this.

We are saying our tech can do the following:

1. Capture our intuition, arational thinking, high-level domain expertise, and thinking without thinking much more efficiently than to date.

2. This will be done using visualisation tools in an inclusive and efficient way: all the way from traditional text to the most sophisticated 21st century augmented-reality code.

3. When we have captured these outputs and stored them humanely, from the inside-out (never intrusively outside-in), and with the active choice and perpetually continual consent of everyone using these technologies, we then need to use machines in constant human/machine dialogue and partnership.

4. This is where the second half of the equation adds everything up: what we capture and share with others is then validated, so even if we are dealing with conclusions from specialists and experts in fields we know nothing about, we will be able to evaluate how much of what they say is actually true. Evaluate enough, to safely and comfortably take our own mission-critical decisions on the basis of other expert conclusions.

Being able to capture and share more efficiently and inclusively what you already know in your own specialist field with others is, in itself, something of a Holy Grail.

However, there would be no point whatsoever if we simply captured for capture's sake.

Generating even more data streams in a world plagued with existing datasets would help no one.

Instead, we propose two features which we believe would serve absolutely everyone on the rock: in every sector; at every level of responsibility; in every moment of their working lives. Here's an overview of what we mean:

1. The first feature is as follows. We suggest that the intuition and high-level domain expertise we capture using our visualisation technologies should be storable and easily retrievable, using machines in supportive roles where they partner and dialogue with their human counterparts.

2. We definitely don't want to create an "artificial intuition", where machines once more are abused in order to remove human beings from the frame of relevant 21st century activity. We are much more interested in augmenting existing human capability to intuit our futures. We aim to do this way beyond anything achieved by human beings up to now.

3. The second feature, on the back of points 1 and 2, would therefore involve using machines to validate human thinking, but always where humans freely chose to allow such validation.

4. Again, we come firmly back to the idea of augmenting human capabilities with tech rather than substituting these subjects using machines.

5. In all of this, we assume the human brain is a malleable, expandable, creative, and efficient deliverer of the new: it's up to us to choose whether we want — in a world of tech — to become more intelligent and thinking, or less.

6. And that's the choice.

7. And it impacts directly on our species' chances of survival, as well as that of our organisations' bottom lines.

Just imagine: imagine a tech mogul at the head of a huge transnational tech corporation. It's not hard to do, right? What do they use to get where they've got to? It's not the ability to crunch numbers or understand KPIs. We could all be taught to do that.

It really isn't, is it?

Doesn't it have much more to do with the capacity they have to see and shape futures?

Their ability to imagineer what no one has seen as yet?

Their nous when it comes to judging the opportunity?

Now imagine your organisation of 20,000 employees, or 150,000, or 300-odd ... or just 10, or maybe 2, or maybe 1. And imagine what all these people could do if they could capture and validate everything they already knew, so any and all mission-critical decisions could take into account every single piece of intellectual property generated daily in such an organisation.

Who, then, is augmented intuition really for?

Tens of thousands of privileged human beings? Hundreds of thousands of lucky ones? Or millions of species-saving geniuses, able to deliver a more efficient future for us all?