In this interview given two months before Chester Barnard died, management professor William Wolf pursued a number of general interest as well as academic topics. Again my interest was drawn to his thoughts about the non-logical processes. In contrast to the previous material, Barnard hinted at an intuition in the large that reached beyond experience and training. Added emphasis appears in red, and my reactions are enclosed in a box: (Note 135)

Wolf In your own experience, though, you have experienced things first, you've developed intuition, haven't you?
Barnard I don't know that I would say first; I would say you operate simultaneously by different methods. No one has yet explained the power of induction. There's a gap between what you know and what you have observed, so that you jump from here to there. Most of the jumping is bad, it doesn't turn out; nevertheless, that which does turn out is based on that kind of unexplainable jumping in the human mind, something internal which strikes me as a most elusive thing!
Twenty five years after Mind in Everyday Affairs, Barnard was more convinced of the intracable nature of the intuitive process. His recognition of the "gap" between what is known and what you are confronted with hints at intuition in the large. I learned to "explain" that jump by recognizing a link between the mind and past and future information outside an individual mind.
  How did Mozart as a boy write beautiful music? It didn't come from outside instruction. It didn't come from any scholarly study. It came from inside. It's a sense of harmony and relevancy and all that sort of thing. It seems to belong to some people and to be completely absent for others. Now, there are some theorists, and probably more today than there were, especially in mathematical physics and mathematics, who are without practical experience except for the lead pencil and paper; but, generally speaking, the people who can produce are those who can add to the effect of intuitive familiarity an analytical approach.
His reference to harmony and "all that sort of thing" reinforced the hint of intuition in the large. By loosely interpreting "it came from inside" to mean from the Self or inner divine, an even stronger recognition of intuition in the large was present. Barnard's mature perspective seemed more compatible with The Intuitive Self than had previously been the case.
Wolf With the exception of these pure mathematicians, then the predominance in the behavioral sciences, or most sciences, seems to be from intuitive familiarity rather than insight? This bothers me because I'm an academician, and my job is supposedly to train people, to train future managers. I wonder, in your opinion, how does one really train people for management?
Barnard Well, I don't know the answer to that in respect to management or to any other thing. I would say that a prerequisite to effective training is a familiarity with the subject matter, a familiarity that is based upon interests and not upon analysis. How do you teach people to write good English? . . . Well, I don't think there is any doubt that there's some point in having instructions in the subject, but I think there's a lot of doubt as to how effective that can be for the great majority of students. They get something out of it, but not the thing you are trying to teach them. . . .
Barnard recognized a fatal flaw in teaching management. Vocational skills such as bookkeeping could be taught. Since they are rational, they lend themselves to rote memorization and drill through skill exercises. Any subject with a significant non-logical component cannot be taught. An experiential environment can be created to stimulate self discovery and provide opportunities for sharing those discoveries with fellow learners. Maria Montessori was clear that education was a process that developed spontaneously. Create an environment and get out of the way!
Wolf This is an unknown quantity that occurs in individuals.
Barnard I've looked over so many people who apparently are successful and tried to figure out why it was, without any success. You can easily say about a good many moves "this is a bad move," not because it will certainly turn out badly, but because experience indicates that it probably will and that, therefore, you'd better keep away from it. You can say that sort of thing; but you can't say that what this one is doing is positively wrong, and you can never say about anything that I know of that it will positively be right.
In facilitating explorations of intuitive knowing, the best I could do was to encourage initiatives that would probably be helpful and discourage those that probably would not. I was sometimes surprised by learning that took place in ways I might have said would not work. However in a broader sense, the stronger my connection with The Intuitive Self, the closer I came to saying this or that would be right or wrong. I do not know how many lifetimes it will take to form a truly close bond with The Intuitive Self.
Wolf You come to a sort of a theory of relativity in life, as well as in physics. Yet in business decision making, Herbert Simon, for one, seems to be building more and more complex models for business decision making; he is moving in the direction of quantifying, putting it on a computer, coming up with the correct decision, or relatively correct decision. What's your reaction to the quantitative approach to business decision making?
Barnard It is that it may prove useful when sufficiently developed and when its limitations are also thoroughly understood. I would say in the field of aeronautics and modern electricity that there's a good deal that could not ever have been attained by intuitive familiarity. Particularly in the case of airplanes, there is very much that has been dependent upon pure mathematical calculation that would be outside the range of the ordinary human capacity to dope out; but you couldn't run an airplane industry on it.
While the extraordinary contributions of quantitative approaches to technical problems has reached unparalleled heights, they have made no significant inroads in areas characterized by anything more than a rudimentary degree of human interaction. At the height of my operations research career, my linear programming skills were more than competent. Still my most sophisticated models incorporated only trivial representations of interpersonal dynamics.
  While I think that the mathematical model method of Simon's may prove useful in an intellectual sense, I have yet to be shown that it will enable men effectively to put the whole picture together, which is what you have to do in a running stream of events. You have to assume a too static world to operate in some of these techniques. Now, I have to say that there's a lot of Simon that I can't follow; his mathematics is beyond me. His earlier book, the manuscript which I read for him, had not reached that stage, but he must have studied a great deal of mathematics since then.
A rational model with a holistic perspective is a contradiction in terms. The rational process is deductive while the holistic is inductive. To build a model, I fragmented a situation into sufficiently small logical units that they could be expressed in deterministic functions. To see the big picture, I groked the gestalt of innumerable details distilling the essence of a situation pointing me in an appropriate direction. I learned about groking, to understand thoroughly and intuitively, when I read Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

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