If you enjoyed the piece in Forbes earlier in the week about the similarities between poor geopolitical analysis and psychic cold-reading, an expanded version, “Geopolitics: Shortcuts For Spotting Good And Bad Analysis” is now available on Seeking Alpha.
A Slipshod Analysts Best Friend.
Near the end of a seminal essay on strategic surprise, Richard Betts writes, “The intelligence officer may perform most usefully by not offering the answers sought by authorities, but by offering questions, acting as a Socratic agnostic, nagging decision makers into awareness of the full range of uncertainty, and making authorities’ calculations harder rather than easier.” I believe that the same should be true for corporate strategy consultants: often their job is to make long-range calculations harder rather than easier.
Why then, is the opposite so often true? In a world in which surprise, disruption and the unanticipated are rife, why do strategists who promise to make calculations easier rather than harder often succeed? I think a phenomenon that I call of “Gresham’s Law of Strategic Advice” is at work.
E pluribus unum
