Your Business May Be Asking for a Different Kind of Intelligence

Dear Oikonomos (Steward),

What do you do when the numbers make sense, the strategy is sound, the opportunity looks right, and yet something still does not sit right with you?

I have been thinking about how much intelligence we use to build and lead. We have business intelligence, financial intelligence, emotional intelligence, artificial intelligence, and access to more data than perhaps any generation before us. We can study the market, analyze patterns, measure performance, forecast outcomes, and make decisions with an extraordinary amount of information in front of us.

And all of that has value.

But what happens when the question in front of you cannot be answered by what you can see?

A spreadsheet can tell me whether an opportunity is profitable. It cannot tell me whether I have the authorization to pursue it. Data can tell me there is demand. It cannot tell me whether I am supposed to meet that demand. Strategy can show me how to grow something. It cannot tell me whether God wants it to grow.

There are questions our natural intelligence was never designed to answer. And I believe this is where Spiritual Intelligence becomes necessary.

For me, Spiritual Intelligence is not about becoming less strategic or less practical. It is not choosing prayer instead of doing the research, looking at the numbers, reading the contract, or understanding the business. It is recognizing that there is another dimension of information available to us as people who walk with God.

There are things that must be discerned.

The visible can tell us what is happening, but it cannot always tell us what’s behind the things we see. It cannot always reveal timing, motive, alignment, or what God may be doing in the backdrop.

That matters in business because not every good opportunity is ours. Not every open door is God’s direction. Not every increase is an instruction to expand. Not every resistance means stop. And not everything that makes sense is necessarily what God is saying.

We need another kind of intelligence to know the difference.

I think this is one of the challenges of being capable. We know how to solve problems. We know how to research. We know how to strategize. We know how to look at what is in front of us and determine the most reasonable next step. But what happens when the reasonable next step is not the one God had in mind?

That’s where I believe many of us have found ourselves at one point or another. We are not lacking information. We may actually have too much of it. What we are lacking is the ability to recognize which information matters for the decision God is asking us to make.

Sometimes the answer is not hidden in another report. Sometimes what we need is discernment.

We need to see what is not immediately visible. We need to hear beyond the noise of urgency, opportunity, fear, expectation, and even our own ambition. We need to understand what God is saying about the thing in front of us and recognize what belongs to us before we execute.

That is why I do not believe Spiritual Intelligence belongs only in prayer rooms, churches, or what we normally call “spiritual matters.” If I need the wisdom of God to steward what He has entrusted to me, then I need it in the boardroom. I need it in the hiring conversation. I need it when I am deciding what to build, what to stop, what to invest in, who to partner with, and which opportunity to walk away from.

The marketplace does not become less spiritual because money is involved. If anything, perhaps it reveals even more clearly why discernment matters.

There is another question I have on my heart: What if some of the problems we keep trying to solve with more strategy are not strategy problems? What if we are trying to analyze what must be discerned?

That does not make strategy unnecessary. It simply puts strategy in its proper place. Business intelligence can help me understand what I can see. Spiritual Intelligence helps me steward what I cannot. And perhaps our businesses are asking us to develop both.

So today, Oikonomos, when you look at the decisions in front of you, perhaps the question is not only, “What do I know?” It is also, “What am I discerning?”

That is exactly the kind of conversation we are opening up tonight during the Beyond the Book Virtual Tour around The Kingdom C-Suite. We are going beyond the pages of the book to talk about what it looks like to actually lead, build, decide, and steward with God in the room, especially when strategy alone cannot give us the answer.

May you continue to see beyond the visible and steward what truly matters.

Camille