One of the great joys in life is the experience of discovery.

Whether it’s launching off on an untraveled bike trail or taking a chance on a Tuscan red on a wine shop’s discontinued shelf, discovering something new is quite an engaging experience. Often the best discoveries are accidental, or at least incidental.

Case in point: While on a business trip to L.A., I heard the most amazing guitar music in the taxi I took between appointments. The cabbie was kind enough to turn me on to Armik: an Iranian-born, L.A.-based, Spanish-influenced flamenco artist. Never in a million years would I have Googled or iTuned Iranian-born, L.A.-based Spanish-influenced flamenco music. Yet Armik’s “Malaga” is now one of my favorite CDs.

So much of creativity is about being open to discovery. Maybe it even requires deliberately moving into places and spaces that are unfamiliar. Something about discovery triggers the creative genes within each of us.

Much of creativity involves observing or discovering something in one context and applying it to another. It’s how Picasso in Tête de taureau could see a bronze casting of a bull’s skull and horns emerging from a bicycle saddle and handlebars. It’s how George de Mestral and his dog, returning form a hike covered with dried seed burrs, ultimately invented Velcro. (Actually, the dog’s contribution to the discovery is still a matter of some debate.)

The point is that the next big creative leap forward for your company may be right there, ready to be discovered. You just have to be paying attention.

Which wing of an airplane is the most important?

It’s the same with information and intuition.

This is true not just in marketing and branding, of course, but in most areas of life. Consider the pro football coach whose staff has reviewed hours of game film of the opposing team, only to see the coach make a counter-intuitive decision—counter-intuitive based strictly on what the game reels showed, anyway—when calling a play on the field. The coach is striking a balance between intuition and information.

Similar observations can be made in bakeries, research labs, police investigations and political campaigns. The data is crucial, but so is good judgment.

Malcom Gladwell describes some of what might be going on in this process in his book Blink. But his most recent book, Outliers, suggests that expertise/success comes after 10,000 hours of involvement in any given endeavor.

Intuition is thus not some magical gift. It results from of years of good and bad decisions, whose cumulative weight lends confidence and success in decision-making. An old friend use to say, “Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”

The way I’ve approached it with many of the gifted young people here at The Creative Alliance is that it’s okay to make mistakes—just don’t make them twice. (One of the corollaries to this is reminding them that they have yet to make a single mistake that I haven’t already made.)

For most marketers, pressed especially hard to make the “right” decision in a brutal economy, success will take a perfect blend of information and intuition. Experience shows that when information and intuition are at a logjam, for most people, intuition wins. Most of the CEOs we work with have a sixth sense of timing and proportion that I’ve learned to respect as we help them reach their business objectives.

The point is to make sure both wings of the airplane are securely fastened…that information and intuition are both getting their proper respect. Then you really get the chance to fly.

“Never before has a crisis unleashed so much raw data—and so little interpretation…”

Thus begins Alexander Wolfe’s insightful InformationWeek.com article about Twitter and the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The deluge of postings, images, tweets and phone calls live from the scene made this a watershed event in news dissemination.

Unsurprisingly, the user-generated coverage created a scenario in which at least one Twitter host was aggregating information in what seemed like an authoritative resource, but may have contained many inaccuracies.

(We’ll put aside for now the question of how extensive a security issue is at stake when terrorists can potentially access social media users’ real-time updates on the condition and whereabouts of hostages or the movements of police.)

The situation in Mumbai suggests that the much-feared Big Brother impact of Google and other info-behemoths has perhaps given way to the equally dangerous mass creation and distribution of unvetted data from unverifiable sources. Some major news media outlets played into the trap, relying on these questionable sources as part of their information gathering efforts.

The concern for marketers is that this empowerment of the masses via social media—and the speed at which postings can spread—can undermine the credibility of a brand. Any opinion, rumor or truth about a brand can rapidly gain prominence in the world of user-generated content. A brand’s response via social media must feel authentic and be carefully calibrated for the intended audience.

Social media credibility will need to be bolstered by other forms of brand-building, PR and information distribution, because one thing that has not changed in the age of Twitter is this: Brands are belief systems, and that makes maintaining credibility more important than ever before.