Beyond Outsourced Thinking

Seeing for Yourself

"I did everything right, and yet failed".

We hear this expression all the time all around us. Far too many individuals feel, with a great sense of dismay, that they took the right approach towards handling the situation they encountered, and yet they failed, while those who played lousy won.

What is the touchstone that people use to conclude that they did the "right thing" ?

In most cases, the criteria used is - "I played by the book. I followed what the experts and the wise ones have said". And yet, I failed ...

Why does this happen ? Why do people fail inspite of playing by the Book and doing everything right as per the popular wisdom ?

The reason is simple : Playing by the Book is a sure-sign of mediocrity and ordinariness.

Playing by the Book is a confession that I outsourced my thinking to others.

Playing by the Book deprives one of originality and creativity in thinking, leads us through a road that is much taken, but which possibly doesn't lead to the destination we seek to reach out to.

The Chess Engine that does it all wrong and wins

In the late 2017, Alpha Zero became the first computer program to consistently beat the world GO champion, Lee Sudol. After establishing its prowess in GO, Alpha Zero was trained in chess. Unlike conventional chess engines, which are trained by feeding in master games by human players, Alpha Zero learnt chess starting from tabula rasa - a blank slate - playing against itself. It learnt its chess from the first principles of the game. Since it didn't refer to any human chess play, its playing style is absolutely original and creative.

Alpha Zero is known for its extreme dynamic and hyper-aggressive play. Its unconventional approach takes the very phrase "unconventional" to unconventional extremes.

Chess is a highly evolved sport with a very strong theoretical foundation. The skill of playing chess involves being familiar with a large repertoire of rules of thumb and sound chess principles. The basic foundation of Chess theory begins with its demarcation of a chess game into three distinct phases - Opening Game, Middle Game and End Game. Each phase has its own objectives, style of play and a whole bunch of "rules of thumb" and "guiding principles".

For example, a chess aspirant is taught not to waste moves. Moving a piece twice in the Opening phase is a crime. You waste precious "tempo" (time) doing so, which could be otherwise utilized developing one more piece. If there are multiple options to capture a piece, one is encouraged to capture a piece that gives you more control of the center. The King needs to be properly guarded all the time.

The most important principle of a chess strategy is "material advantage", i.e. the comparison of the strength of the pieces each player has. Bitter battles are fought to gain an advantage of even one pawn. Being just a pawn up at the high levels of chess is considered a very very big deal, and often plays a decisive role in leading to a win.

It is not just the human players. Even the conventional chess engines store thousands of such rules, and apply these rules while figuring out the next move. Doing so enables them to cut down largely on the tree-search and looking ahead through all possible moves before choosing the best. This enables them to play well at a decent speed, as following these rules of thumb drastically reduces the amount of evaluation required for picking up the best next move.

While watching analysis of chess games or live commentary of matches, you would often come across games played by Grand Masters, where the analyst or the commentator says something on the lines of - "this is against the basic principles of chess, but a master knows when to break rules".

How does a master know when to break rules ? What does the Master know that the ordinary chess players do not ? Why would moving the same piece multiple times during the Opening be fine for a Master but would get a lesser player all knocked down ?

As if this was not enough, Alpha Zero takes this disregard for the Book to another extreme. While a Master might know when to go against the Book, Alpha Zero has almost zero regard for the Book. It doesn't even know that the Book exists.

To begin with, Alpha Zero's games have no lines demarcating the Opening, Middle or End phases of the game. It doesn't hesitate in moving the same piece across multiple times during the Opening. It doesn't bother about creating barricades or fortresses for the King, and doesn't have any qualms leaving the King with very little protection. At times, it indulges in serial sacrifices, giving away piece after piece with no immediate compensation in sight, and a dozen moves later, the opponent finds himself all knotted down.

This is an example of a game play by Alpha Zero (playing white) against the champion of all the Chess Engines, Stockfish. While conventional chess would keep the King well-guarded with pawns, Alpha Zero has thrown all caution to the winds (and in process, forced Stockfish to do the same, giving it little option to do otherwise). Alpha Zero is already two pawns down in the game, does little to recover them or gain any compensational advantage for that in the near term. In turn, Alpha Zero gives away a lot more pawns as this game proceeds.

And yet, Alpha Zero ends up on the winning side.

The games played by Alpha Zero have stunned and stupefied chess experts all over the world.

Game after game, we see Alpha Zero putting itself into seemingly perilous situations and yet coming out victorious with absolute control over the entire situation.

How is it that Alpha Zero goes against every bit of the Chess Theory as prescribed in the book, and still ends up winning in the most spectacular fashion all the while ?

To understand this, we first need to understand why does a player play by the Book in the first place ?

To take it a step further, we need to consider this :

Why is there so much emphasis on Principles and Theories to guide our decision making in so many areas of our life - Chess, Sports, Corporate, Marketing, Governance, etc ?

Playing by the Book

What does "playing by the book" really achieve ?

The most important effect of "Playing by the book" is that it provides a "comfort factor".

For example, in the context of chess, when we keep the King well protected by an array of pawns, it gives us a feeling of safety and security for the King. Any attack on the King would have to go through the barricade of pawns, and we would have sufficient time to spot the danger and take corrective action. A human chess player, including the Grand Masters, and even conventional chess engines, would shudder to leave his King wide open and unprotected.

Likewise, "material advantage" provides the trust that with more pieces, one might probably be able to do a lot more - defend more, attack more, try to create new combinations. Just the presence of extra material feels you have more in your hand to play with.

All these notions - tempo, material advantage, protection, etc are creations of the human mind, and do not exist on the chess board.

What this approach disregards is that chess is eventually a positional game. What happens in the current position is more important than what led to this position. I could pin down the opponent's King in the corner, checkmating it with just two pieces, while all the pieces of the opponent could be lying on the board far away, in a disconnected position, and totally incapable of preventing any assault on its King.

It is not the number of pieces present which matter, but their position and their ability to defend its own King or attack the opponent's King

A Probabilistic Approach to Thinking

All theories and principles, including the Chess Theory provide a probabilistic and a very "approximate" approach to thinking. It trades off precision and accuracy for maintaining a higher probability of doing it right. It arises from the presumption that following the principles that have evolved from centuries of experience of great players would in all probability, keep us safe, and keep our chances of survival alive.

An amateur boxer may believe that throwing a thousand punches gives an upper edge. A master boxer can knock his opponent down with one right punch executed with perfect precision.

While, playing by the book keeps us in a decent emotional shape, it robs us of our penetrative vision and deep thinking.

For example, a very important principle of the Chess Theory states that given two options to capture an opponent's piece, choose the option which allows your piece to move towards the center and capture more of the center.

For example, in the above situation, the Black Bishop can be taken by two possible White pawns. The Chess Theory stipulates that of these two possible options, the Bishop should be taken by the b2 pawn (shown by the Green Arrow), since it causes the White Pawn to move towards the center.

Consider a chess learner who arrives at this decision fork during his chess games. Imagine that every time he encounters this situation, he goes by the book and captures the piece as prescribed by this principle, without spending much effort in analyzing if a new creative situation was possible by taking the other option.

By doing this, the chess learner would probably do well in reaching to a certain level in chess, and manage to win games, but he completely deprives himself of hundreds and thousands of opportunities of analyzing chess positions.

Playing by the book makes us feel safe and secure. It gives us a feeling - "although I cannot see very far off - I am doing what the experts down the ages have recommended and hence, and it should keep me okay".

Playing by the book is essentially an outcome of inability or willingness to see far or think deep.

This is true of every domain. The excessive clamour about sound Management principles comes from those managers who feel less confident about their own intuitive abilities to handle situations and hence, need a recourse to the experts. An HR personnel, struggling with an understanding of the human psyche and management of human emotions are the ones who would desperately seek out principles of HR management. A teacher, unequipped with the principles of learning would wonder how expert teachers would teach this subject.

The Downside of "Outsourced Thinking"

Playing by the Book wires us to follow instructions. It makes us seek an answer to "what should I do" from an external response, and hence makes us natural "followers".

The primary pitfall of following the rules of thumb and guiding principles is that it forces us to outsource our thinking process. Somewhere, someone - probably more capable than us - at some point of time, has done all the thinking that was needed to be done, and has distilled his insights in profound ways. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we just need to grab this wisdom with both hands and apply it. In a fast moving world, that's how we save time.

The Rules of Thumb and the Guiding Principles give us a false sense of moving in the right direction. They create an inaccurate perception of doing the right thing, without requiring of us to be aware of the complete picture. We feel we have an answer, but in all probabilities, an incompatible or an irrelevant answer.

Sticking to the Rules of Thumb consistently ends up short-circuiting our thinking process by providing a quick answer, without much analysis of the situation. As a result, no new learning takes place.

This creates an ecosystem where there are a few spikes of deep and creative thinking, executed by chosen experts, and the rest of the ecosystem just adopts and applies what is handed over to them. This makes Thinking a very specific skill, best left to the experts.

In this paradigm, "Learning" is relegated to the task of ingesting copious volumes of these rules of thumb and guiding principles that the experts have laid down for us.

Seeing Through One's Own Eyes

Why do we feel the need to "play by the book" in the first place ?

The reason we seek out for the rules of thumb and guiding principles is because of perceived limitations in our own ability to grasp and visualize situations in their entirety.

All the reasoning and inferences about the shape of the Earth was only necessary till we looked around from the ground level. Because we couldn't really see how the Earth actually looked, we need to look around for clues and make logical deductions and inferences about how the Earth looked. Once we were able to fly sufficiently high and look back at the Earth, take pictures of it, no further analysis or inferences about the shape of the earth was necessary.

All the rules of thumb and the guiding principles we reach out are required and necessary only to the extent we are unable to perceive situations in their entirety.

When we have a limited perception and can view only a part of the situation, we need to create rules that keep us going. If we look at a maze from a ground level, we might try to create certain guiding principles to help us navigate the maze. All need of such guiding principles arise from the fact that "we cannot see enough".

Looking from a Higher Plane

Playing by the book often ends up over-trivializing a complex, multi-dimensional problem, and provides a solution to the over-clipped version of the reality. Naturally, it is going to be incomplete in its reach and power.

Rather than over-triviliazing a complex, multi-dimensional problem, we need to develop skills that help us upgrade ourselves to escalate us to levels where we can get a complete bird's eye-view of the situation.

We need to elevate ourselves to higher levels from where we can "see" far, wide and deep.

We need to allow ourselves to "see" exactly what connects to what, which path leads where, and then allow these considerations to guide us in picking up what path we choose to take.

When we can "see" more, we need to resort less to the "approximate" thought support provided to us by the Rules of the Thumb and Guiding Principles.

That's where Deconstruction plays an incredible role.

Deconstruction is the ability to break-down and understand a complex multi-dimensional problem without over-trivializing it.

Deconstruction puts us on top of a situation and in control of it, rather than clipping down the perception of a problem creating unaddressed blind spots.

The primary vision of ReInvent's 3-Step Deep Thinking Framework is to empower individuals in all walks of life to be able to escalate their capabilities to a level which allow them to see more, see deep and see wide enough to get an exact representation of what is, leading to triggering of insightful ideas.

The Masters Don't Break the Rules - They Just Don't Bother About Them

The Leaders and Masters of any field do not confine themselves to any set guiding principles. Leaders and Masters are often perceived as "breaking the rules", but breaking rules is not what a leader's prime concern is. They are more focused on learning from first principles and analyzing situations with a deep penetrative vision. They are clear of their objective, they have an exact perception of the situation, and they go after their target with a very strong sense of purpose and power.

To an onlooker, it may seem that they are breaking the rules. But to them, they are just doing what they have perceived to be the right thing, without any doubt whatsoever, and execute it without any hesitation.

When we can see something with absolute clarity and precision, we do not need to indulge in reasonings and inferences about the existence and validity of it.

The Leaders and Masters prepare themselves to be able to "see more" with great clarity and precision. They consistently strive to take themselves to a higher level of perception. That's the reason why they go for paths which the rest of us are totally blind to. And while we feel that they are breaking the rules, they are just taking the best possible path to their destination, which they know to be the right one beyond any inkling of doubt.

Thinking with Purpose and Power

In the words of the experts, Alpha Zero displays a very "human sense of consistent purpose."

Alpha Zero has been an inspiration to re-look at the way we learn, store our learnings and apply our learnings to solve problems. The insights from Alpha Zero would go a long way in enabling us to move away from being compendiums and encyclopedias of borrowed knowledge, and move towards a more dynamic approach to thinking with more purpose and power.

The world needs us to be Alpha Zeroes, playing with a great sense of accuracy, precision, purpose and power, rather than the conventional chess engines, who play by a large number of memorized rules.

How does Alpha Zero find its accuracy, precision, purpose and power ? What does it do differently that makes it such a dynamic learning power-house ?

In future articles, we would explore insights from Alpha Zero that could totally transform how we think, learn and solve problems.

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