Paradox, New Wisdom, and “Counter-Factual” Thinking

In the previous post I said a “shrinking, expanding world” where time compression, distance compression, emergent complexity, and high individual expectations is fuelling fundamental changes in our society.

I also made the claim that the answer to surviving and thriving in this new global order is based on building our capability to access, understand, and apply new knowledge as innovation.

In order to delve further, lets consider “conventional” versus new wisdom.

Conventional wisdom informs us:

• “What has been will be again” or “the past is the key to the future.”

• Good decision making is based on a detailed understanding of past relationships between a reduced set of “critical factors”, to yield a defined and “theoretically” supported result.

• Expect logic to prevail and refine your decision model with experience.

New wisdom suggests:

• “What has been has gone forever”

• Good decision making is built on an appreciation of past relationships but a flexibility of mind to look beyond the “known” to assess emergent relationships and factors with similar weight.

• Expect chaos to prevail and adjust/regenerate your beliefs (decision model) with new information and experience.

Conventional wisdom served us well until the Web-age because it focuses on finding the most explanatory, probable, and therefore average circumstance. Selling to the “average market segment” and forgetting outliers was the most effective strategy prior to the Web. Moreover, the strategy was consistent with the economic context, technology, and cultural beliefs around power and authority at that time.

When the world began to shrink and expand, new channels opened and the outlier market segments became economic. A global economy reduced manufacturing costs and opened up incredible opportunity in diverse, fast-growing markets. Improvements in educational standards and information accessibility led to a shift away from “one size fits all” and conventional wisdom’s power to predict and interpret our world was swamped by complexity. It is likely these conditions will continue to evolve, fuelled by a ever-reducing cycle of change, where the past will be less able to predict the future.

All of us have been taught the conventional approach to life and business. Most of us are still either naïve or grappling with the new wisdom as we find it hard to adjust or regenerate our beliefs. Change is hard – even for those of us who yearn for personal change! Habits are difficult to break and to depart from. Our old decision model incites uncertainty.

However, thriving in this new order requires new wisdom – an example of which is counter-factual thinking:

• Question: How do we deal with time compression?
  Answer: Think time decompression!

• Question: How do we deal with distance compression?
  Answer: Think distance decompression!

• Question: How do we deal with complexity?
  Answer: Think simplicity!

• Question: How do we deal with high expectations?
  Answer: Think low expectations!

I will elaborate on these intriguing counter-factual insights and connect these insights to organisational information and knowledge systems in my next post.