Strategygram: The Magician and The Wand

Do you remember ‘The Parable of The Kitchen Spindle’? Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker narrate it in?Decision Traps.

Once upon a time long ago—well before iPads and QR codes—a restaurant owner was harried by the constant squabbling between his cooks and waitresses.

The disputes became so dysfunctional that he sought help from four consultants, each an expert in his speciality.

The?sociologist?diagnosed the situation as a status hierarchy problem—higher-status cooks were being compelled to take orders from lower-status waitresses. His recommendation? Send the cooks and waitresses to a sensitivity training programme.

The?anthropologist?discerned the problem as an inversion of gender roles that violated wider societal and cultural norms. Male cooks were being required to work on orders initiated by female waitresses. (Yes, this parable is?that?old.) His recommendation? Appoint a senior cook to oversee the work flow: waitresses would bring the order slips to him and he would then allocate those slips to the other cooks.?

The?psychologist?defined the situation as a case of sibling rivalry—the cooks and waitresses were competing for the attention of the parent-figure, the restaurant owner. His recommendation? Send the cooks and the waitresses for weekly counselling sessions to allay jealousy and quell competitiveness.?

The?information theorist?determined that the friction was caused by cognitive overload. There were too many orders to keep in mind during peak times, with the inevitable slip ups triggering finger pointing and stress. His recommendation? Ask the waitresses to enter orders into a new computer system which would then sequentially display the orders for the next available cook.

The boss was completely puzzled and perplexed. Each viewpoint seemed reasonable but he couldn’t implement all the recommendations, let alone pay for all of them. What’s more, even if he could rustle up the money for one of the solutions, what if that solution didn’t work?

The drama in the restaurant continued to escalate until one day, totally frustrated by the discord, the boss voiced his dilemma aloud in front of a junior cook standing nearby.?

The junior cook mentioned: “In the restaurant where I worked earlier, we had a simple wooden rotating spindle in the kitchen. The waitresses clipped their orders to it. When a cook was ready to start cooking, he turned the spindle and picked up the next order. Everything worked smoothly. Do you think that might work here too?”?

The boss replied he didn’t know but he would ask the four consultants for their opinion.

Each specialist stated that his original recommendation was the best solution, but it might be worth giving the kitchen spindle idea a try.

The?sociologist?said that the spindle would remedy the status imbalance because each order from a waitress would have to wait till the cook was ready to pick it up.?

The?anthropologist?said the spindle, being an impersonal object, would remove the static from the reversal of gender roles where females were handing orders to males.

The?psychologist?said the spindle would recast the interaction, circumventing sibling rivalry.?

The?information theorist?said the spindle would reduce cognitive overload, since the orders would be stored on an external memory system, somewhat like a computer’s.?

The boss went ahead and installed the kitchen spindle. It was a great success. And he never had to go back to the consultants again.?

The moral? If it’s a good idea, it will make sense from different perspectives. But also: the frameworks and templates we use as a result of our specialist education, carve out invisible grooves in our minds, confining our thought flow within those conceptual channels.?

The frameworks and templates we use as a result of our specialist education, carve out invisible grooves in our minds, confining our thought flow within those conceptual channels.?

These strategic frameworks and templates corral our perceptions, curtail our premises, constrain our proposals. The proposals may not be wrong—they may actually work—but lacking the foundation of full-range thought, they are sub-optimal.

Strategic frameworks tell us what to look for in a situation—the components and the configurations, the connections and the changes—but each framework comes with built-in assumptions and logic cues about what is noise and what is signal, what matters and what doesn’t. And therein lies the quicksand.

The frameworks and templates and techniques and tools we love and use instinctively—our go-to solution technologies, the ones we reflexively start to think with—are powerful but also palliative. They may impress our audience, even as they suppress our thinking.?

At some point they inveigle you into believing you are apprehending the elephant, although you are only selectively grasping the trunk, the tusk, the tail.

The seductive power of popular strategic frameworks or their shiny new successors, brings to mind John Culkin’s caution: “We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.”?

So you keep in mind that no matter what the framework or template or tool in your intellectual armoury,?the situation is the boss.

No matter what the framework or template or tool in your intellectual armoury,?the situation is the boss.

You behold the situation with a beginner’s mindset; you listen to what the situation, with its parameters and constraints, is telling you, heeding it without the filtering and shaping effects of pre-formatted solution methodologies, without the assumptions inherited from your previous experiences, without the contamination of derivative thinking; and you then?purpose-build?your frameworks, templates, and tools so that to this unique situation you bring your unique sagacity and conjure up your unique solution.?

What you relish is the emancipation of fresh perception, the enforcement of first-principles, the evacuation of clichéd thought.?

Relish the emancipation of fresh perception, the enforcement of first-principles, the evacuation of clichéd thought.?

Frameworks and formats and templates and tools and techniques are essential for growing your professional expertise. You imbibe their learning, but not their conditioning, their coaxing.?

They are intellectual callisthenics, not intellectual prosthetics.

You appreciate where the magic really comes from.?

As a sign displayed above the entrance of a hypothetical Wizards’ Club elucidates: “The magic isn’t in the stick, it’s in the magician.”

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘The Magician and The Wand’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.?

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.??

#strategygrams?#visualthinking?#branddifferentiation #brandstrategy #brandexperience #clarity?#visualstorytelling #story #strategy #strategist?