Abstract: Decisions in organizations are made after analysis and using intuition. To the field of Human Resource Development this is troubling as we are addressing employees’ knowledge and skills. To better understand the ways in which intuition (Akinci & Sadler-Smith, 2020) is used to make decisions in organizations it is important to examine the phenomenon and its application to learning. In this paper we attempt to attend, in a small way, to this criticism by exploring one aspect important to understanding intuition in the workplace – somatic knowing. We do this by incorporating literature, carefully selected (Breslin & Gatrell, 2020) for its relevance to, and support of, acknowledging, valuing, and integrating somatic knowing into organizational practices that promote learning. First, we present a brief explanation of somatic knowing. Next, we discuss two concepts central to somatic knowing - critical place inquiry and embodied sensemaking. We conclude the paper with suggestions for the use of somatic practices and embodied learning in HRD research and practice to encourage further exploration of these constructs within organizational settings.
