Hi Roger, this resonated. I work with a framework that distinguishes three relationships people have with any belief or paradigm: Fused (narrative and reality welded together, can't separate), Held (conscious, deliberate, sustained because of what it produces, updated when it doesn't), and Worn (costume, compliance without belief).
Your cult story and RCP8.5 are textbook Fused. And the pattern you describe: "settled," anomalies suppressed, dissenters labelled deniers, is exactly the enforcement mechanism that keeps people Fused. The tragedy isn't just that Fused beliefs break. It's that when they do, people overshoot straight to cynicism (Worn), bypassing the conscious, adaptive relationship entirely. Potentially your roommate didn't become a better thinker? The post-RCP8.5 backlash may not produce better climate science. Fused to Worn, every time.
What you prescribe, strategy as theory, anomalies as data, WWHTBT as discipline, is clearly Held. Your own observation from previous articles that frameworks need to be useful more than right is the cleanest definition of Held I've come across. Fused needs it to be right. Held needs it to be useful. The entire difference between a strategist and a zealot lives in that gap.
The question I keep working on: can you introduce a paradigm, strategy, science, whatever, in a way that starts people at Held, rather than Fusing them first and hoping they survive the disillusionment? Popper and Kuhn describe the cost of getting this wrong. I don't think either offered much on how to get it right?
Wow Rob. That is a very laden comment. Thanks so much for it.
That is a very interesting model. Is it yours? If there more to read on it? It resonates greatly with me.
In terms of your question, I think I designed the Strategic Choice Structuring Process to produce Held - without knowing about Held. For example, I say you should tack up next to your desk the WWHTBT page for the chosen strategy and every morning ask yourself whether the WWHTBT are still true/getting truer or are they becoming less true. If the former, just keep doing what you are doing. If it the latter, it is time to revisit your strategy.
If I am understanding Held properly, I think that approach helps you set yourself up for Held to be easier than not to adopt and maintain.
I really like what Adam Grant says in Think Again. The story about the black man who befriended the Ku Klux Klan guy really stuck with me. We hold some beliefs as a part of identity and the need for a consistent sense of self. The man above went to great lengths to really understand the KKK guy's perspective - he didn't try to change it. Slowly, a level of psychological safety developed between these men and from there things started to shift. At least that's my understanding of it.
I really enjoyed this piece. The theme goes well beyond ordinary strategy - it made me read closely and reflect on wider implications that extend far beyond the field itself. It also resonates deeply with my own experience as a developer of innovative strategy architecture, one that practically challenges the 'the science is settled' stance across multiple established theories.
I won't forget the moment, some time ago, when you encouraged readers - strategy practitioners and thinkers alike - to develop their own strategy frameworks. I was grateful for that encouragement and replied that I was already doing exactly that, and intended to keep going.
Let me close with your own words: "So, don't settle - and if people tell you an issue is settled, don't be cowed by them. It is a signal that it is your job to create a superior paradigm, because they certainly won't."
Hi Roger, long time reader here! I’m not sure if this is the best way to phrase my question or if it has already been answered (forgive me!).
I have been taking up your advice on exploring anomalies the moment you brought it up in your previous writings/presentations. I would like to ask what are the ways/frameworks/steps one can take to go about on an intentional search for anomalies, as my past experience with them has always been more a “stumbling upon” approach.
For example, if I am dealing with a FMCG brand like you did with P&G and one of the problems my client has is with low distribution, poor sell-in and sell-through (the common issues) – how do I get to the Walmart solution? Hope this is ok to ask.
I’ve been mulling over this article and your body of work, and I think it points at an important tension it doesn’t name: a strategy only does its job if the organization commits to it, and that commitment is the very thing that blinds people to the anomalies that should be unsettling them.
I keep coming back to your own opposable mind as the way through. Train executives to hold two opposing ideas at once, and “our strategy is sound” and “this anomaly might be telling us it isn’t” stops being a contradiction they have to resolve by picking a side. They can keep mobilizing behind the strategy while staying genuinely open, which is the posture that lets the WWHTBT work happen instead of getting shouted down.
And it resolves one of two ways. Either you dig into the anomaly and it falls apart, which is good news because your paradigm just got stronger. Or you keep pulling the thread and find the real gap, and now you know exactly where to adjust. Both beat suppression.
The thinking may even be the easy part here. The hard part is getting an organization to drop its defensive routines long enough that the anomaly even gets heard.
Felipe: Agreed entirely. And AG was awesome at this - though it sometimes drove his team to distraction. He made bold choices - and committed entirely to them. But every once in a while, he would take note of an anomaly and say, 'we have to take a fresh look at x.' People would gasp and say 'oh no, we are going to abandon what we are doing now.' But that wasn't his intent. He just wanted to have a relook in case there was really a signal that change was required. Plenty of times, no change was made. But in a minority, the anomalies were the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Best, R
I always find it challenging to try and convey an idea to people who believe the matter to be "settled". It's usually hard to get people to change their mind, especially when relying on logic to do so...
As a University of Padua alumnus (where Galileo Galilei used to teach) can't help by adding to your "list of settled science" the fight to heliocentrism Galileo himself had to endure as "absurd and false philosophically and formally heretica".
I like this article but I have sympathy for some of the 'settled crowd'. I have always wondered why confirmation bias exists and my best explanation is that it clears the way for action. Now there are clearly times when it clears the way for bad action and you highlight some above. But there is a fundamental element to be distinguished. Is it due to naiveté (like your college-mates), or due to a power and influence agenda (dare I say, like the climate change example - or though even here they may have been using a misguided strategy to try and create action)? I believe that in the case of the former, the Adam Grant Think Again approach to connecting with 'why' those people have chosen that path is crucial. Helping people see that 'settling' is a legitimate way to action and make a form of progress they seek is powerful. Actually, I don't think there is a human alive who doesn't - in some subtle ways at least - settle in the name of action in some respects. The challenge is to 'persist variously' which is really tough when there is a lot at stake - but it starts with awareness of what you're actually doing.
On a rather more procedural issue, and I submit this respectfully, may I suggest that the editing of your pieces sometimes lacks the rigour of your thinking. I often notice banal editing things - which are no big deal and maybe serve to prove that you actually wrote the article rather than used an LLM! However, for me anyway, they subtly detract from the enjoyment of reading your material. Now maybe I'm showing myself to be pedantic but I spotted one instance in particular in this article which I think might be an exception which proves why I'm unsettled enough to raise this - ad hominin (sic) - which I have no doubt is a result of your moving at pace rather than not knowing the correct spelling - but for some (maybe younger) readers it might cement the wrong term and spelling in their brain. May I suggest that you put your articles through an LLM and ask it simply to fix any obvious grammatical issues?
On the second point - ouch! For what it is worth, I never write using an LLM and never intend to, even though never is a long time. And though it would be relatively harmless to put it through an LLM for spell-checking, I just don't want to go there because I want to be distinctly LLM-free. I do edit these pieces quite thoroughly. Nothing gets posted without 10 or so rounds of editing. That notwithstanding, my eyes sometimes miss one - though it tends to be one every three or four articles and someone always points it out to me and I fix it for posterity. I hope you are wrong that the occasional misspelling creates a bad user experience.
On the first point, I believe that you can take action - and do so confidently - without settling. Basically, I think people should have a Bayesian updating mentality. They should make a decision at time t-zero with all the information they have at that point in time. And even though they can be never certain that it is 'right,' they should commit to it because it is the best they can do. But then they should watch and update their decision set with all the new data that flows over the transom and if the determination of the best decision changes, they should change course and if it doesn't change they should stay the course.
I worry that if people think that they have to wait until they have a 'settled' issue, they will wait too long. And then they will be overcommitted to it in the face of anomalies because they invested so much in getting to settled.
I think there is a similarity to the IDEO idea of failing early and fast. The theory is that in innovation if you invest a for a long time and with a lot of capital before getting true user feedback, failure will feel horrible and painful - and you might ignore the bad feedback because you are so committed to idea in which you have invested so heavily. Instead, you should go to users early to get feedback that helps you develop and improve the innovation.
This is similar. If you wait for a settled decision, you will be defensive about it. If instead you think of it as the best decision you can make at the time, you won't be defensive and you will be more open to anomalies and learning from them.
Roger, amongst my many careers, I used to be an English teacher. There is no problem with your writing. There's no need for anyone to write so much to complain about a couple of spelling or grammatical errors. They make it into formally published works, even after enormous vetting, let alone an informal online publishing platform. You publish it in the book, then on a re-read notice the error and say, "How did that get through?!" And, unarguably, LLMs get it wrong all the time, too. Especially when those programs are structured to prefer American versus Canadian vs UK vs (in my case) Australian Standard English.
Thanks as always for your supportive thoughts. And we are of like mind. My skin crawled as I wrote about that episode that had been buried deep in my past. Best, R
Thank you, Roger! So happy Covid didn’t settle you.
They tried hard - but didn't get me!
I just wanted to say, thank you for that final paragraph in the article.
Thanks Felipe. I always want to be encouraging! R
Hi Roger, this resonated. I work with a framework that distinguishes three relationships people have with any belief or paradigm: Fused (narrative and reality welded together, can't separate), Held (conscious, deliberate, sustained because of what it produces, updated when it doesn't), and Worn (costume, compliance without belief).
Your cult story and RCP8.5 are textbook Fused. And the pattern you describe: "settled," anomalies suppressed, dissenters labelled deniers, is exactly the enforcement mechanism that keeps people Fused. The tragedy isn't just that Fused beliefs break. It's that when they do, people overshoot straight to cynicism (Worn), bypassing the conscious, adaptive relationship entirely. Potentially your roommate didn't become a better thinker? The post-RCP8.5 backlash may not produce better climate science. Fused to Worn, every time.
What you prescribe, strategy as theory, anomalies as data, WWHTBT as discipline, is clearly Held. Your own observation from previous articles that frameworks need to be useful more than right is the cleanest definition of Held I've come across. Fused needs it to be right. Held needs it to be useful. The entire difference between a strategist and a zealot lives in that gap.
The question I keep working on: can you introduce a paradigm, strategy, science, whatever, in a way that starts people at Held, rather than Fusing them first and hoping they survive the disillusionment? Popper and Kuhn describe the cost of getting this wrong. I don't think either offered much on how to get it right?
Wow Rob. That is a very laden comment. Thanks so much for it.
That is a very interesting model. Is it yours? If there more to read on it? It resonates greatly with me.
In terms of your question, I think I designed the Strategic Choice Structuring Process to produce Held - without knowing about Held. For example, I say you should tack up next to your desk the WWHTBT page for the chosen strategy and every morning ask yourself whether the WWHTBT are still true/getting truer or are they becoming less true. If the former, just keep doing what you are doing. If it the latter, it is time to revisit your strategy.
If I am understanding Held properly, I think that approach helps you set yourself up for Held to be easier than not to adopt and maintain.
But I am very curious on your point of view.
Best, R
I really like what Adam Grant says in Think Again. The story about the black man who befriended the Ku Klux Klan guy really stuck with me. We hold some beliefs as a part of identity and the need for a consistent sense of self. The man above went to great lengths to really understand the KKK guy's perspective - he didn't try to change it. Slowly, a level of psychological safety developed between these men and from there things started to shift. At least that's my understanding of it.
I really enjoyed this piece. The theme goes well beyond ordinary strategy - it made me read closely and reflect on wider implications that extend far beyond the field itself. It also resonates deeply with my own experience as a developer of innovative strategy architecture, one that practically challenges the 'the science is settled' stance across multiple established theories.
I won't forget the moment, some time ago, when you encouraged readers - strategy practitioners and thinkers alike - to develop their own strategy frameworks. I was grateful for that encouragement and replied that I was already doing exactly that, and intended to keep going.
Let me close with your own words: "So, don't settle - and if people tell you an issue is settled, don't be cowed by them. It is a signal that it is your job to create a superior paradigm, because they certainly won't."
Thanks Alex. Glad you enjoyed and also happy that you are developing your own strategy framework. Best, R
Hi Roger, long time reader here! I’m not sure if this is the best way to phrase my question or if it has already been answered (forgive me!).
I have been taking up your advice on exploring anomalies the moment you brought it up in your previous writings/presentations. I would like to ask what are the ways/frameworks/steps one can take to go about on an intentional search for anomalies, as my past experience with them has always been more a “stumbling upon” approach.
For example, if I am dealing with a FMCG brand like you did with P&G and one of the problems my client has is with low distribution, poor sell-in and sell-through (the common issues) – how do I get to the Walmart solution? Hope this is ok to ask.
I’ve been mulling over this article and your body of work, and I think it points at an important tension it doesn’t name: a strategy only does its job if the organization commits to it, and that commitment is the very thing that blinds people to the anomalies that should be unsettling them.
I keep coming back to your own opposable mind as the way through. Train executives to hold two opposing ideas at once, and “our strategy is sound” and “this anomaly might be telling us it isn’t” stops being a contradiction they have to resolve by picking a side. They can keep mobilizing behind the strategy while staying genuinely open, which is the posture that lets the WWHTBT work happen instead of getting shouted down.
And it resolves one of two ways. Either you dig into the anomaly and it falls apart, which is good news because your paradigm just got stronger. Or you keep pulling the thread and find the real gap, and now you know exactly where to adjust. Both beat suppression.
The thinking may even be the easy part here. The hard part is getting an organization to drop its defensive routines long enough that the anomaly even gets heard.
Felipe: Agreed entirely. And AG was awesome at this - though it sometimes drove his team to distraction. He made bold choices - and committed entirely to them. But every once in a while, he would take note of an anomaly and say, 'we have to take a fresh look at x.' People would gasp and say 'oh no, we are going to abandon what we are doing now.' But that wasn't his intent. He just wanted to have a relook in case there was really a signal that change was required. Plenty of times, no change was made. But in a minority, the anomalies were the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Best, R
Great read
Thanks Reilly.
Thanks for this important article.
I always find it challenging to try and convey an idea to people who believe the matter to be "settled". It's usually hard to get people to change their mind, especially when relying on logic to do so...
As a University of Padua alumnus (where Galileo Galilei used to teach) can't help by adding to your "list of settled science" the fight to heliocentrism Galileo himself had to endure as "absurd and false philosophically and formally heretica".
Wild times (didn't change too much after all 😬).
Ahh. That is a cool connection. It is hard for Canadians to conceptualize. The first Canadian universities opened long after Galileo's time. Best, R
I like this article but I have sympathy for some of the 'settled crowd'. I have always wondered why confirmation bias exists and my best explanation is that it clears the way for action. Now there are clearly times when it clears the way for bad action and you highlight some above. But there is a fundamental element to be distinguished. Is it due to naiveté (like your college-mates), or due to a power and influence agenda (dare I say, like the climate change example - or though even here they may have been using a misguided strategy to try and create action)? I believe that in the case of the former, the Adam Grant Think Again approach to connecting with 'why' those people have chosen that path is crucial. Helping people see that 'settling' is a legitimate way to action and make a form of progress they seek is powerful. Actually, I don't think there is a human alive who doesn't - in some subtle ways at least - settle in the name of action in some respects. The challenge is to 'persist variously' which is really tough when there is a lot at stake - but it starts with awareness of what you're actually doing.
On a rather more procedural issue, and I submit this respectfully, may I suggest that the editing of your pieces sometimes lacks the rigour of your thinking. I often notice banal editing things - which are no big deal and maybe serve to prove that you actually wrote the article rather than used an LLM! However, for me anyway, they subtly detract from the enjoyment of reading your material. Now maybe I'm showing myself to be pedantic but I spotted one instance in particular in this article which I think might be an exception which proves why I'm unsettled enough to raise this - ad hominin (sic) - which I have no doubt is a result of your moving at pace rather than not knowing the correct spelling - but for some (maybe younger) readers it might cement the wrong term and spelling in their brain. May I suggest that you put your articles through an LLM and ask it simply to fix any obvious grammatical issues?
Gregg: Thanks for the note.
On the second point - ouch! For what it is worth, I never write using an LLM and never intend to, even though never is a long time. And though it would be relatively harmless to put it through an LLM for spell-checking, I just don't want to go there because I want to be distinctly LLM-free. I do edit these pieces quite thoroughly. Nothing gets posted without 10 or so rounds of editing. That notwithstanding, my eyes sometimes miss one - though it tends to be one every three or four articles and someone always points it out to me and I fix it for posterity. I hope you are wrong that the occasional misspelling creates a bad user experience.
On the first point, I believe that you can take action - and do so confidently - without settling. Basically, I think people should have a Bayesian updating mentality. They should make a decision at time t-zero with all the information they have at that point in time. And even though they can be never certain that it is 'right,' they should commit to it because it is the best they can do. But then they should watch and update their decision set with all the new data that flows over the transom and if the determination of the best decision changes, they should change course and if it doesn't change they should stay the course.
I worry that if people think that they have to wait until they have a 'settled' issue, they will wait too long. And then they will be overcommitted to it in the face of anomalies because they invested so much in getting to settled.
I think there is a similarity to the IDEO idea of failing early and fast. The theory is that in innovation if you invest a for a long time and with a lot of capital before getting true user feedback, failure will feel horrible and painful - and you might ignore the bad feedback because you are so committed to idea in which you have invested so heavily. Instead, you should go to users early to get feedback that helps you develop and improve the innovation.
This is similar. If you wait for a settled decision, you will be defensive about it. If instead you think of it as the best decision you can make at the time, you won't be defensive and you will be more open to anomalies and learning from them.
Hope that helps.
Best, R
Roger, amongst my many careers, I used to be an English teacher. There is no problem with your writing. There's no need for anyone to write so much to complain about a couple of spelling or grammatical errors. They make it into formally published works, even after enormous vetting, let alone an informal online publishing platform. You publish it in the book, then on a re-read notice the error and say, "How did that get through?!" And, unarguably, LLMs get it wrong all the time, too. Especially when those programs are structured to prefer American versus Canadian vs UK vs (in my case) Australian Standard English.
A beautiful rebuttal of scientism. And of manipulative religion. Your experience with Rich makes my skin crawl.
Thanks as always for your supportive thoughts. And we are of like mind. My skin crawled as I wrote about that episode that had been buried deep in my past. Best, R