Out on the edge
Should strategic thinking focus on the seen and known or the unseen and unknown?
That might sound like a ridiculous question. How can you focus on something that is not there, something that you don't know about?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, proposes that as humans we are wired to focus on the central tendency - the middle of what we call the bell curve or the Gaussian distribution. We expect the world to be as it has been. We have models of how the world works in our head, and they lead our actions. Without our seeming understanding of how things are and will be, we would be lost.
Taleb calls us to try to look at facts as facts, and to avoid immediately processing them in our mental constructs. The premise is that the accumulation of facts without immediate interpretation can lead us in new directions.
When I was growing up, my smart and well-read mother instilled in me two seemingly contradictory understandings. First, that being endowed with brains and curiosity it was my obligation to be well read and to seek knowledge. Second, that the more I learned the less I would know. Of course, what was meant by the second understanding was that the process of acquiring knowledge would open doors to an expanding universe that no matter how dedicated I was I could never explore to any great degree in its depth and breadth.
Here we have what I see as a siren call for strategic thinkers: To think "on the edge," away from the central tendancy, the common explanation, the fat part of the bell curve of experience and expectation. We need not to look for what we know and confirmation; that's understood and others will account for this in their thinking. We need to look at what we don't know and information that discredits "normal" premises.
The great universe out there that we tend not to acknowledge in our day-to-day thinking offers pitfalls and potential that can both bite us and offer up wonderful opportunities. We will profit most by focusing on the edge, not the center.
