What if not knowing is the most advanced form of expertise?
Intuition has been treated as the opposite of rigor. Something to override, apologize for, or keep quiet about in the meeting room.
My research suggests the opposite is true. And it goes further than you might expect.
What my research is about
I am a doctoral researcher at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design, where my work sits at the intersection of law and design. My research explores intuition as a legitimate, learnable, and transformative form of professional knowledge and challenges the Western rationalist framework that has long defined what counts as knowing in legal practice.
At the heart of my research is what can be called super intuition — a form of knowing that goes beyond individual rational thought into something collective, relational, and embodied. My research asks whether and how this capacity appears in legal practice, and what it might mean for how we understand professional expertise.
This is not research about hunches or soft skills. It is research about a profound human capacity and a bigger question: what if the way law constructs knowledge is itself part of the problem?
Why this matters now
The one-world problem.
Current legal practice is predominantly designed on Western, rationalist traditions that suffer from what researchers call epistemic ignorance: a structural inability to recognize or value knowledge systems outside rational thought. Lawyers are trained to prioritize formulas, procedures, and predictability. Intuition — let alone collective or relational knowing — has no official place in this system.
And yet the challenges we face — ecological, social, technological — cannot be solved by rationalist frameworks alone. They require a different kind of knowing. The capacity to sense what isn't yet visible. To hold complexity without reducing it. To act wisely in the face of genuine uncertainty.
The most important professional skill of the next decade is not a technical one. It is the ability to know differently.
Publications and work
Korhonen, H. & Toivonen, N. (2025). Contract Design Process as a Learning Path to Proactive and Sustainable Contracting. International Journal of Commerce and Contracting (IJCC), 9(3-4), 1–20.
Korhonen, H. (forthcoming). Intuition. In: Edward Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Design. Edited by Helena Haapio, Anne Ketola & Nina Toivonen. Edward Elgar Publishing. (Book is currently in editing.)
Suoheimo, M., Korhonen, H & Toivonen, N. (forthcoming). Service Design. In: Edward Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Design. Edited by Helena Haapio, Anne Ketola & Nina Toivonen. Edward Elgar Publishing. (Book is currently in editing.)