Intention is the virtuous, mature opposite of suffering, which instead of burning time, energy and money on an attempt at controlling an uncontrollable thing about life, we instead do our best to strategize, and align resources to set goals and achieve them. It is a kind of preparedness for actions in striving for a goal, with the highest likelihood of achieving it.
Intention could be considered to be the combination of more elementary aspects of psychology - the combination of one's left-brain and right-brain intellectual skills, powered by the emotions of potential energy (well-being) and kinetic energy (confidence), to fuel one's pursuit of a goal. Which begins with a strategic action likely to make progress, rather than mindless, undirected action that wastes energy, time and money (suffering.) But not before a second psychological resource is first paired with the intellect.
One must be conscious to use intention, by way of employing Observing Ego in its awareness of one's inner resources to match in timing and effort with the outer, environmental conditions. If this sounds like making use of intuition about the optimum benefits of taking action in only just the right environments and conditions, then you are right:
Intention is a combination of the intellect with the decision-making capacity, before one applies energy to make a move toward a goal.
If Observing Ego were not present to pay attention, nor the intellectual strategy for using data in the right way, nor the wisdom of decisions to know the right kind of environment and right timing for applying the energy of action, then the person is sure to fail, and is in fact, suffering (through burning energy unlikely to change our situation.)
Since the intellect exists on a spectrum between the education filling the left-brain and the experience filling the right-brain, and since decisions are informed by a spectrum between the conscience to do the right thing by others, and the intuition to find environments that treat us rightly in return, one can envision a kind of "compass" or "target sight" for aiming at our goals with efficiency and constructive ("Win/Win") methods:
