The thinking human manifesto

There is nothing so practical as a good theory - Kurt Lewin

(It seems the roots of the quote go back to Aristotle - Kindly hinted by Borja Adsuara).

This post has been nurturing for months, maybe years. And hope it does not show the anxiety flowing through me while putting this to form. Specially when what I want to do, is a unabashed praise of an endangered specie: the once hailed thinking man. And anxiety is something that belongs to the realm of the guts.

We need to take back some power from the guts.

The sorry state we are in

We are living a world where thinking is being sniffed at like something of the past. Something belonging to the slowpokes, the artritic, the fluffies, the old guard. Culture is a burden for the warrior. Reading is a sign of weakness and a sure sign of not being an action man. If you think, that's what you do. Thinking all day long, head in the clouds, being away from where the action takes place and where real decisions are made.

Or if you come from UK, Poppycock.

This pervasive, poignant and poisonous narrative seems to be spread everywhere. Just look around a bit. Donald Trump or Brexit are clear embodiments of what's wrong on the overall proposal regarding the dismissal of expert opinion as "just another opinion. Mostly biased, that is".

If your eyes do not bleed under those captions, or didin't bleed when you read them back in time, you are dead inside. Maybe it's my inner nerd speaking, but I am nothing short of gobsmacked regarding this kind of attitudes.

And of course, the fact that, for example, the whole pro-Brexit agenda was a huge pile of speculation and pure, undilluted bullshit, didn't move an iota of the narrative nor made the culprits ask for forgiveness. Matthew Inman, The Oatmeal, just published a beatiful piece about why do we react as trapped animals when we are faced with facts that contradict our beliefs.

Jonathan Swift put it beatifully as well:

I'm not alone pointing that there is a incredible danger lurking below the nerd-bashing phenomenon. Tom Nichols wrote this seminal article regarding the death of expertise (Which has been just turned into a book) and as the causes run deep and I don't want to focus my post on that factor alone, I'll let it to you to dig deeper into that rabbit hole. The conclusions are awful. The book, on the other hand, is awesome. Buy it.

Who framed Roger Expert?

I don't know if you are familiar with the work of George Lakoff on cognitive linguistics. He is best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. He speaks about the capacities some people have to "frame" a conversation in order to force acceptance of a concrete point of view by chosing a concrete linguistic game field. For example, in Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf, he argues that the American involvement in the Gulf war was obscured or "spun" by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it. 

Lakoff would admire the wonderful framing that experts have suffered through time.

It starts slowly. Experts are first treated like "too much in the clouds". Their calls to strategic thinking are answered on this fashion:

"That sounds too theoric"

"Sounds like consulting to me" - this is the kind version, you can substitute "consulting" for anything more offensive.

"I would like to have something less abstract"

Of course, the reframing also happens on the other side of the road.

"You know, I'm more of a doer"

"I do not lose time with minutiae"

"Let's get practical"

The thinker gets then webbed in a narrative which frames their suggestions as complex, impractical and hard to achieve. There is some kind of beatiful, simple, obvious solution just waiting to be unveiled by the magic of the practical man. And if that pink unicorn just do not exist, because the problem is too hard for easy and lazy proposals to properly solve it, well... it was the economical crisis, my boss, the politicians, the neoliberals, the communists or Marvin the martian.

The thinker is pictured as somebody who wastes time on sterile pursuits, lost on the clouds of his own narcissistic ivory tower, looking down to the peasants and laypeople with disdain. Incapable of doing anything but pondering on how many angels can rest on a pinhead.

This comic caption sends a very dangerous message which is echoed in lots of testosterone-fueled, stupid and thoughtless acts in every corner of the planet.

This cartoon makes me sick, to be honest.

Eric Ries has been raped. Hard.

I have shown a lot of skepticism on bringing design thinking and strategy together. Basically because they come from very different turfs and they are complicate to mix. But there is a deeper reason for that.

I usually suspect when Design Thinking companies position themselves as strategy providers, as Design thinkers tend to think that they can provoke change from mostly cosmetic reforms and glossing customer experience. It really sells like hot cakes, because it's an unbeatable commercial proposal. That's the principle why men's gray hair treatments and diet pills sell like heaven. We do not care of the real problem and we cannot solve it, to be honest, but hey, we can help you look the part. We can help you sound sophisticate and modern, without the drama involved in cleansing your withered board of directors and culture.

I wrote a long article praising the real mccoy, and pointing to the limitations of all the crappy approaches to it. But If I have to isolate a main responsible of the current zeitgeist of non-thinking we are in, I think that one of the most misunderstood people of all time is Eric Ries and its "Lean Startup" movement.

Wrongers of Ries have transformed throwing spaghetti on the wall into a ritual. Get to the prototype. Fast. If it does not work, reformulate . Well, what about thinking.? NO! Get the MVP through the door as fast as you can.

Which is the percentage of Ries' followers who put themselves on a thinking position and start to ponder things like...

• What kind of spaghetti should I use?
• What sort of sauce sticks best?
• What is the recipe that maximises the number of bits who stick to the wall?
• Does adding meatballs help or damage?

...BEFORE the throw? Yeah, that didn't work, let's switch. Hey, honestly, you didn't see that coming? Really? How much time did you put on that? Or you assumed you cannot grasp why things happen? Or are you just damned afraid of what a serious anaylisis would yield regarding your current startup, your current business proposal, your current position, your current reason to get paid?

Are you afraid to touch your customers and really know why they do what they do? I know huge companies which are terrified to make a conscious, strategic effort to know deeply their customers because... "it's not their thing"

What's the difference between this and bruteforcing a password?

Ries himself has to scream to the top of his lungs that there is no way his framework can be detached from what he calls human element... and I call Strategy.

Because of the scientific methodology that underlies the lean startup, there is often a misconception that it offers a rigid clinical formula… This is not true. There is no way to remove the human element – vision, intuition, judgement – from the practice of entrepreneurship, nor would that be desirable.

Thinking loves action. No, really.

Rumelt (Which frequent readers of this blog would recall I acknowledge as the father of modern strategy) said this regarding something as abstract as strategic guiding policies:

“The guiding policy outlines an overall approach for overcoming the obstacles highlighted by the diagnosis. It is “guiding” because it channels action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.…Like the guard rails on a highway, the guiding policy directs and constrains action without fully defining its content.”

Strategy channels action. The final purpose of thinking is to take action. To be more precise, the most correct action possible.

Back to Rumelt

“A good guiding policy tackles the obstacles identified in the diagnosis by creating and drawing upon sources of advantage. Indeed, the heart of the matter in strategy is usually advantage. Just as a lever uses mechanical advantage to multiply force, strategic advantage multiplies the effectiveness of resources and/or actions.”

Strategy comes from the military. Take advantage. Push levers. Make things happen. Win the battles. Save lives.

Real thinkers are nothing short of action heroes.

Here comes Complex Problem Solving

This will take a full dedicated post in the not distant future, so I will just skimp it unashamedly. Will just make bullet points out of it:

• Complex problem solving will be the most sought after skill in 2020 according nothing less than WEF
• There's not a single MBA program who includes it as specific thing to be addressed. The most powerful approaches to the matter come from psychology, not business. Really.
• IA and algorithms are not going to solve nothing regarding increasing complexity, because, well, hype does not move scientists and IA still cannot solve problems by its magical existence.

• Problems are going to get more and more complex with time, with technology crushing all employment based on little added value. Just blockchain will shatter whole industries by itself.

I don't really know how the world is going to be able to balance all this with the current egghead whacking movement. I truly cannot grasp it.

The disdain for theories and hypothesis

(From wikipedia)

When Peter Higgs (and several others) theorized in the 1960s the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of such elusive particle became one of the great goals of physics. CERN announced on 4 July 2012 that they had experimentally established the existence of a Higgs-like boson, but further work would be needed to analyse its properties and see whether it had the properties expected from the Standard Model Higgs boson. On 14 March 2013, the newly discovered particle was tentatively confirmed to be + parity and zero spin, two fundamental criteria of a Higgs boson, making it the first known fundamental scalar particle to be discovered in nature. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.

Let's put Dr. Higgs in today's business and strategy world:

" I have this hypothesis implying..."

"Can I see it? Has been proved elsewhere?"

"Well, no, that's why it is a hypothesis"

"Do not bother me with meaningless things. Bring me a success story"

"Well, no problem, I'll keep the hypothesis under wraps in Tupperware until someone builds a freaking LHC big enough"

In today's world, what is not seen and touched does not exist. The disdain for theories is overwhelming. Every single mental construct is observed with suspicion and every abstraction is seen as a futile and pointless exercise.

"Hey, show me a success story!"

"This is the first time ever someone has tried this. It's a theory, after all."

"Bad luck."

The humanity desperately needs thinking heroes

Somebody needs to be ahead of time. To be ridiculed, to be put to shame, to be mocked by the masses. To lose millions, to be left to public shame and watch helplessly as other people reap the results of their efforts. To sometimes, as Edwin Howard Armstrong - The freaking inventor of superheterodyne and FM, nothing less - did, die in a suicide while fighting in court all the beatiful ideas that they stole from him. Embittered with all his struggle, he hit is wife in a rage of fury with a poker not long before and that final straw sunk him. His wife won all pending legal battles not long after his death.

Why they do that? Why ?

Because IT HAS TO BE DONE. They feel a fire in the chest that can't be extinguished. They need to do it. The problem is there, like Everest to Mallory, and they won't bulge until it's solved. The inner force is unstoppable, and sleep, hunger, poverty... eventualy do not matter.

We advance as humans because people out of time come and deliver us a message from the future, a Prometheus-like present, not to be enjoyed by them, but for future generations. We owe everything to this kind of people who often die pauper and forgot by his peers. Mozart. Isaac Peral. Howard Amstrong. Tesla.

As Tesla (The band) said about Tesla (The man)

All along, world was wrong, you was right.

Conclusion

The world needs people who thinks and who take pride on thinking being their main craft. Otherwise, everthing becomes hacking and chopping, and bruteforcing the problems. We haven't reached the moon or conquered smallpox by hacking away. We have arrived there on the shoulders of giants. Of thinking giants.

Most of us who proud ourselves of earning our money from thinking should take a stance and point our fingers where intelligence and deep thinking are being dismissed. We need to take an active position on this. I think intelligence and thinking are suffering from a kind of bullying that we would not tolerate on, just as an example, colored people, women, or LGTB people.

We should be proud of being thinkers. We may be brilliant, or average. Not everyone is able to pull the kind of thinking feats that people like Tesla could do. But our contributions are wheat grains in the whole humanity wisdom barn. Some of the power thinkers like Tesla bring a truck with a ton of wheat, some of us bring a couple of grains here and there. But we respect the fact that has made us humans. Deep, resolving, thinking. Our quality as humans is somehow measured by the quality of our thinking. Tigers, Lions and Bears are doers. Because they have no choice. Now that I come to think about it, that's why they no longer rule the earth, maybe. They had to face a terrible enemy who was a pushie and with no claws or teeth, but with a lethal weapon on its arsenal. Freaking brains.