SQUIRCLE: A New Way to Think for a New World
Interview by Adélaïde Barbier, September 2020
Francis Cholle, you are an international business consultant and best-selling author. Your signature is helping companies adapt, innovate and succeed in a rather unconventional way.
You have spent the past 15 years advising C-suite leadership around the globe — across various industries and companies of all sizes — on how to implement your high-performing methodology to revolutionize their business performance. This methodology was developed through science and practice and explained in the three books you’ve published.
I’ve seen you in action and can attest to how you question traditional thinking and offer the world a pragmatic model to see business in a radical and fresh new light. Yet it all happens naturally, with ease and empathy. I’m delighted that you would share your knowledge, experience, and techniques here.
You just published a book called SQUIRCLE. What is SQUIRCLE?
SQUIRCLE is a science-based model designed to enhance the way we think. In a more and more complex world, we need to rely on a deeper intelligence to make good decisions. SQUIRCLE recognizes the importance of our rational minds (SQUARE) while honoring the natural insights from our intuition (CIRCLE). Understanding how to enable synergy between both leads to a life-changing mindset that will create success with teams, clients’ problem solving, or complex decision making. It is designed for business and all aspects of life.
10 years ago, you wrote The Intuitive Compass. What is the link to SQUIRCLE?
The Intuitive Compass® is a model I developed offering a new business method for executive decision-making. Proven to be very efficient with top management and resulting in consistently striking results, I now want to offer a new, simplified, and easily actionable version of this framework for their teams and beyond. SQUIRCLE is a scalable model that can have a wider use among businesses but also outside, in schools, and even at home. That’s also why I created SQUIRCLE ACADEMY. My vision was to create a community of users who can access all the resources they need to start their SQUIRCLE journey. I still use the Intuitive Compass model in my practice with businesses to advise CEOs and their executive teams to help rebalance their relationship to reason and instinct in their decision-making processes.
For us to understand SQUIRCLE better, would you mind defining reason and instinct?
Reason is our ability to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic, based on deduction and induction. Instinct is understood as the innate ability to adapt and stay alive. Intuitive Intelligence is defined as the synergy between reason and instinct, made possible by intuition which bridges the two.
Intuition is the ability to notice and understand information that our logical mind cannot access or make sense of because this information is not explicit. Intuition is like a search engine that goes beneath and beyond where the logical mind operates. It is a cognitive process that not only captures unusual signals but can also understand some of them immediately without conscious reasoning. Gut feelings are considered here as the outcome of this intuitive cognitive process.
When reason becomes dominant, it destroys intuition to the point of depriving us of our essential instinctive skills of adaptation, invention, and complex problem-solving (visualize a CIRCLE trapped in a SQUARE).
Today, from our education system to our work environment, it is clear that rational logic dominates our ways of thinking. This is probably one of our biggest cognitive biases; however, I rarely see it mentioned in business and managerial literature.
This is why I created the SQUIRCLE™ (SQUARE + CIRCLE) model. It allows us to overcome this false opposition between reason and instinct, and therefore free the CIRCLE (instinct and intuition) of the confinement of the SQUARE (reason).
Since we live in a very rational world, does this mean we are all SQUARE?
The answer to your question is no. We are not all SQUARE. The proportion of people with a SQUARE thinking preference compared to CIRCLE preference varies from 80% Square/20% Circle to 66%/34% based on our SQUIRCLE test statistics, which are relatively recent but also based on a previous proprietary assignment we still use today and another pre-existing assignment that has been in existence over decades and used by millions of respondents and that look at similar psychometrics.
What attributes do you assign to the SQUARE versus the CIRCLE?
We are all educated to develop a SQUARE approach to life. That is, to think logically and rely on rationality and facts to make good decisions. But there is more to us than what can be understood through logic. Emotions, inspirations, intuitions, and sensations all live beyond logic. These not only make us uniquely human, but they enable our creativity and agility and directly connect us to our bodies as well as to nature within us.
SQUARE symbolizes the logical mind: deduction and induction, information and evaluation. It is rational, dependable, stable, predictable, and orderly. But it is limiting. This is why we have arts to stimulate our imagination, sports to engage our bodies, and games to encourage learning and risk-taking. Our feelings and hunches help us engage with the ambiguity and complexity of life. They provide the necessary level of subtlety to go beyond binary logic, to think deeply. Noble Prize in physics Niels Bohr’s famous quote illustrates this point perfectly: “No, no. You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.”
CIRCLE symbolizes instinct and intuition: emergence, fluidity, and unpredictability. It is non-linear, inclusive, and adaptive. Like nature, it is complex and creative, holistic and infinite. This is why CIRCLE is so important in a time of increasing uncertainty and so necessary to shift from our exploitative relationship with nature to adopting a regenerative model. This is what every company has to integrate into its management culture (disruption) and business practices (CSR).
If the CIRCLE is natural — the nature within us — why have we lost the connection to the CIRCLE in our lives?
We have alienated the CIRCLE in our lives by misjudging science. As Dr. Matthias Stelzner, chair of the Surgery Department at the University of California at Los Angeles/VA, shared with me after reading SQUIRCLE, “We have progressively assigned science a role that it never claimed: to give us certitudes. The purpose of science is to produce knowledge.”
It remains our responsibility to decide what to do with this knowledge. But it is so much more comfortable to implicitly believe that what’s rational is right and what’s not rational wrong. That allows us to shy away from responsibilities and gives us the illusion of control over life’s and nature’s unpredictability.
The good news, though, is that this centuries-old bias is at odds with the latest scientific research, led by renowned scientists like Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, or Director of the Center of Brain and Creativity at the University of Southern California and neuroscientist, Dr. António Damásio.
Dr. Gigerenzer researched the importance of heuristics for reliable decision-making and better adaptation in an uncertain environment, while the work of Dr. Damásio explored the importance of emotions in our capacity to anticipate and perceive decisive nuances in complex situations.
How do we access our intuitive intelligence? How do we free the CIRCLE?
First, let’s remember CIRCLE (intuition) is always on. If it’s not “freed” it’s because we simply don’t pay attention to it. Few do. Why? Because faithful to a dominant SQUARE, most of us still expect intuition to tell us what’s right from what’s wrong. I keep reading article titles in respectable trade magazines such as, “Should you follow your intuition?” and “When to trust your intuition?” This is not the function of intuition to tell us what to do unless we connect with a gut instinct in a situation of emergency. Intuition is more like a search engine that reaches places where logic cannot go. It brings back clues that enrich our perspectives and that don’t necessarily make sense, but it doesn’t mean that these clues are void of value. Therein lies our responsibility to decide what to do with this non-logical information.
“Freeing” the CIRCLE simply requires becoming aware of our bias for a dominant SQUARE to purposefully undo it, so that you can become receptive of your intuitive sense.
Can you give us examples of practice to learn how to “free” our CIRCLE?
There are ways to do this. They are really simple but not always easy to execute. It takes a lot of practice and letting go. Let’s take the example of mountain climbing. Business schools like Wharton bring their students into mountaineering expeditions. It provides an environment where you have to make reasonable decisions in a very emotional context, and mitigate performance optimization and risk management.
Reaching peak performance requires hyper-focus and physical relaxation, all at once.
You operate in a place where the unexpected can happen at any given moment. At a sensory level, you need to be very alert to pick up subtle cues from the changes in the mountain wall, the temperature, and the weather or your equipment. Breathing is an essential tool to stay in the moment and avoid any potentially fatal distraction. (There is a whole science to the art of breathing. You can find useful book references on SQUIRCLEACADEMY.com under “Science” in the menu.)
Similarly, the most important and most difficult pose in yoga is Shavasana or corpse pause.
It is the time when your neurovegetative system can integrate all the stimuli and adjustments accumulated through the class. You reap the fruit of all your efforts. But to be most efficient, you have to do nothing. Absolutely nothing, like a motionless dead body. Hence the name of this yoga pause, when being most passive means the highest return (health) on investment (your time and effort).
At work, in the office, or at home, you can take a few minutes to pay attention to the movements of your diaphragm and practice cardiac coherence advocated by the French physician, neuroscientist, author, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. David Servan-Schreiber. It consists of inhaling for five seconds, then exhaling for the same amount of time (for a 10-second respiratory cycle).
Biofeedback devices make it possible to observe on-screen how this deep, regular breathing slows and stabilizes the heartbeat. This way we can reduce stress, improve concentration, and enhance creativity and productivity while spending less energy. Athletes have been using this method for decades and the greatest American universities have been researching and implementing it in their curriculum (MIT created a dedicated chair called the Presencing Institute and delivers a worldwide online class using these principles). But for this to work, it is critical to let go of any strategy and outcome.
Let go? What do you mean exactly?
A sports medicine doctor who worked with France’s boxing national team for 4 years and Tour de France cyclists for 12 years, Jean-Jacques Menuet, writes in his professional blog, “Letting go is to relieve psychological tensions and stress that pollute pleasure but also performance. This problem concerns the athlete, but also the executive in a company.” And to add, “We have everything to gain from working on this notion of “letting go”; more pleasure, more performance, better management of emotions and, above all, more intuition. That is to say that the best tactics, the best choice (…), the better strategy will be put in place without control, rather thanks to the “unconscious mind” than to the “conscious mind.”
Menuet goes on to explain that in cycling, a sprinter who trusts everything that his computer memory has accumulated as information will be able to make decisions spontaneously rather than self-consciously staying focused on the information displayed on the computer screen. “When this happens, it feels like magic!” wrote Menuet. The reason it feels like magic is because it eludes our logical minds. This added performance is the outcome of a complex process that we don’t need to fully understand to fully engage. To do this, we rely on a non-explicit intelligence that operates differently than logic and is only accessible when we let go of mental control.
This is the first installment of our SQUIRCLE blog series.
In Part II, “SQUIRCLE: A Serious Game” we will explore The SQUIRCLE Game and the reasons it is so essential to be playful in business.
Read the next installment of the SQURICLE blog series here.
