We should not be formulating our place or position, these terms are far too static. Instead, we should be interested in how we as a company can intersect with a market’s trajectory.

It’s said over and over again. Many companies are gripped by a sense of urgency. AI is the hottest technology, a paradigm change, they should get in now or miss out. They invest but projects fail to deliver. 

Deliver what?

More of the same. More of what they’ve been doing for years.

They fall because they don’t get it. A paradigm change is not more of the same, but many in executive management aren’t capable of paradigm change. They’re missing insight, not information, not data.

It’s hard work, that gaining of insight. Years of study into subjects that at first glance have nothing to do with your business, with your day-to-day, with anyone’s business, with business in general.

There’s the business world, and the real world, right? Right?

There’s a divide, a perceived divide, between the world of business and the study of world in which that business is to take place. Students of marketing study subjects such as statistics, the psychology of buyers, about campaigns that worked in the in the hope they will work in the future.

They don’t study the humanities, art and philosophy, literature, theology even, they don’t read biographies of remarkable politicians, their successes and their failures.

You look at a two-dimensional chart and you see that curve progressing in a certain direction. You want to anticipate on that direction and you change your company’s product to match. That’s unilateral thinking. You fail because the real world is not two-dimensional.

You might turn your two-dimensional chart into an animated scatter-graph but that doesn’t mean you can shape your mind to be as a murmuration of starlings.

The real world in which your company operates is multi-dimensional. 

Let’s dwell on that for a moment. 

We know objects exist, no, not exist, that’s too stationary, rather they progress, change their shape, in four dimensions; width, height, length, and time. They position themselves, again, no, that term is again too stationary, they move in another four dimensions, relative to your position, you’re at the 0,0,0 of your world, they’re moving away from you, or orbiting you, or closing in on you, at speed, which is another way of saying they’re moving through time.

But you yourself aren’t stationary either, you’re growing or shrinking, in mind and body, you might think to be at your own 0,0,0 but that’s just imaginary, in fact everyone is moving around you like you are moving around them in some giant 4D fairground carousel without the restraining cables.

The guy who invented lateral thinking just went bankrupt.

There are many who think they have a quick solution. in fact, your feed is probably full of them. Mine is. Some I admire, some I heed, most are just repeating the same tired old story.

I cite the term “lateral thinking” because it’s premise is to break out of linear thinking “laterally”. It’s so eighties, and so utterly unfit for what’s happening around us. We’re all lateral thinkers, we’re bombarded by alternative opinions every time we check our phone.

AI is a paradigm change. Problem is, a change to what? That’s what many companies are struggling with. Is it a way to make marketing easier, quicker and cheaper? Sure. But we don’t need even more ads. Is it a way to write a difficult email without getting emotional? Yes, it is. You can write a hundred dismissals in the time it takes to wipe a tear from your eye.

All non-paradigm-change side effects. 

The paradigm change is only visible for those who see it.

I’m an avid follower of substack, in fact I post there regularly. One article in particular stood out. By Simon Pearce of The Liminal Lens. He has a presence on LinkedIn, look him up.

The article’s called Strategic Blindness, and I’ll use one of his examples to illustrate my take.

That example is from the second world war, and it relates to why the French, the British and other allies were so bitterly defeated in the first phase of the war. 

He gives a lot of other detail, but the story basically goes like this: at the end of the thirties a German general wrote a book outlining what a new kind of war would look like. He envisioned how they could conquer France, via Belgium, within a day, with tanks, together with infantry and air power.

Wrote a book. Published it. For all to read. 

After WWI, the French had fortified their border with Germany. It was called the Maginot Line and it was impenetrable. But there was a weakness, the enemy could come in from the north, through neutral Belgium.

The general had explained it all. Only the French didn’t read it. The British didn’t read it.

And so, in 1940, the Germans circumvented the Maginot Line, swinging in through Belgium. Thrashing France. Exactly as was described.

Pearce goes on. We learn that in fact, the Germans did not have better tanks, or planes, or infantry, or more of them. What they’d done was to conceive and execute a plan that made use of the multiplicity of a fighting force like never before. A paradigm change. And they called it the Blitzkrieg.

Asking what the paradigm change will look like is asking the wrong question. 

Many feel that AI carries the power of paradigm change. But what will it look like? Again, this question. This need for the new to be the same as before. 

But here’s a thought. Custom software as freely available as running water. AI on your phone will create features exactly as you need them and delete them when you’re done. No more apps. Your phone is undefined like early mainframes but a gazillion times more powerful, you at the head of a team of coding agents instead of a team of programmers writing COBOL.

You should know your classics. Be naturally inclined to read about origins. Douglas Engelbart gave his Mother of All Demos in 1968, his hero was Vannavar Bush of As You May Think of 1945, whose work was deeply influenced by classic thinkers such as Leibniz. 

The paradigm shift as a term was introduced by American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. It has since become to mean not only that science does not progress in an orderly fashion, but that knowledge in general progresses in disparate jumps, each jump opening up new approaches we’d never considered before.

My feeling is that to make sense of the coming dramatic changes, gathering even more data is not going to help. Instead, reading the classics just might. 

In a minute, as I’m writing this, my day will start. Meetings and phone calls will fill my precious time with immensely important immediate needs. Ever more data I must capture into information. The evenings however, are for the classics, and for insight.

Header image: MURMURATION, CAI GUO-QIANG, 2019