If you are into storytelling, AI, computers, leadership, logic, education, creativity, strategy, etc., you should pick up “Primal intelligence”. Primal intelligence is powered by the animal neuron, which evolved in the Cambrian oceans more than five hundred million years ago. Life was simple then. Eat and do not get eaten.
Two systems in our brain
The first concern, eat, is the origin of logic. The second, Don’t get eaten, is the origin of storytelling. To eat, the brain developed the power to see food. It did so through neurons that detected light, switching on and off. To not get eaten, the brain developed the power to act creatively. It did so through neurons that were mechanically different from transistors. Instead of absorbing data, those neurons innovated behaviour, escaping predators by initiating surprising movements. These dual functions of intelligence evolved, in tandem, over the next half billion years. Each now makes up a large share of our modern human brain:
1. The symbolic logic function birthed our visual cortex, which is an extraordinarily powerful computer, capable of rendering megabytes of sensory data into three-dimensional images.
2. The creative action function birthed our motor cortex, which enables the fingers of surgeons, the hips of athletes, and the arms of dancers to discover movements that heal injuries,
We are not computers
These two functions make our brain different from computers. Unlike computers, our brain doesn’t think only in data and abstractions. It can think in data and abstractions. But it can also think in exceptions and actions, allowing us to spot emergent opportunities and initiate new technologies. Divergent thinking is random. It arbitrarily associates old ideas to produce new ones. Convergent thinking is logical. It refines the results of divergent thinking via pattern finding and prototype iteration. Generative AI has been hailed as the future of innovation. But it will never revolutionise the rules of art, technology, or anything.
Motor intelligence vs synapse thinking
Logic is one thing equaling another (A = B). Action is one thing leading to another (A → B). The distinction can seem trivial, but it’s so fundamental that logicians from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have acknowledged that logic can get no closer to action than if-then statements. Our brain thinks a → B through motor intelligence. Motor intelligence can be abbreviated as moto. It runs on a nonlogical brain machine: the synapse. Neurons do not connect via lightning bolts. They connect instead via protein transmitters and other physical machinery. When neuron A extends a path to neuron B, that’s not a MOS transistor thinking A = B. It’s a synapse thinking A leads to B, or in other words, A → B.
You cannot programme synapse thinking
But couldn’t you digitally simulate that synapse with computer software, thereby programming MOS transistors to think like neurons? In short, a computer simulation of a neuron could operate only as a system closed to the exceptional information that the neuron evolved to process. A → B isn’t better than A = B. Yet it’s often more useful, which is why it exists in the brain. A = B, junking moto and thinking in pure logic. But it hasn’t. It has retained A → B because moto can act smart in ways that logic can’t. Moto is largely insentient. We’re not aware of the action sequences that our neurons use to drum rhythms, write letters, and slice bread. That’s why artists, auto mechanics, and other physical practitioners often can’t articulate how they move their limbs. Instead, they say: Just watch me and imitate.
Storythinking
Simple consciousness is spatial and sensory, reflecting its origins in vision. Self-consciousness is temporal and imagined. It begins with the awareness of our self continuing in time. Self-consciousness is thus narrative. This is perhaps the profoundest example of how our brain is a computer—and also more. To wake up, becoming aware of the world, is to think like an algorithm. But to become self-aware, discovering our own personal history and purpose, is to do what AI cannot: think in story. A story is a sequence of actions: This event caused that event, which caused another event.
You are the upgrade
My latest book about books is titled “You are the upgrade”. The case for augmented natural intelligence. I was immediately triggered. A rally cry for intuition, imagination, common sense, and smart emotion. This brainpower is neglected in modern schools. And impossible for computer AI. Narrative cognition vs logic. In some way, it is very similar to Ken Robinson´s view on education. Watch https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?
Special forces
Angus Fletcher uses the special forces as the frame to explain the concepts behind primal intelligence. In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army Special Operations saw trouble coming. Young Special Operations recruits were underperforming at decision-making, strategic planning, and leadership. They can solve math problems. But not life problems.
VUCA
So Fletcher developed a new method for training the brain to act intelligently in what the Army called VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And we gave it to a classified Army Special Ops unit, at a schoolhouse so covert that it doesn’t exist on any map. Operators got smarter in VUCA and quicker in chaos.
Intelligence
The modern world has incorrectly defined intelligence. Intelligence is almost universally defined as logic. Logic is driving artificial intelligence. It powers arithmetic, statistics, design, data analytics, induction, deduction, interpretation, critical thinking, Bayesian inference, optimisation, ideation, behavioural economics, organisational psychology, system 2, pattern finding, and just about everything taught and assessed in twenty-first-century classrooms.
Logic
Logic pervades these classrooms not only because it is seen as the essence of intelligence but also because it is hard for humans, requiring years of study. Which raises the question: How would our brains think without that study? Logic’s answer is that the human brain is predisposed toward two nonlogical behaviours: randomness and error.
Randomness
Randomness is the absence of logic. Error is the opposite of logic. The path back to sanity begins by acknowledging that intelligence is more than logic, enriched with generative bursts of randomness. The brain has nonlogical intelligence that isn’t arbitrary. That intelligence evolved millions of years before AI’s data-dependent circuits, investing our primordial ancestors with the ability to succeed in the unknown.
Intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense
But as our ancestors self-reflected, using their intelligence to examine themselves, they parsed it into four primal powers: intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.
- Intuition perceives the world’s hidden rules.
- Imagination makes the future.
- Emotion knows the path of personal growth.
- Common sense decides wisely in uncertainty.
These four primal powers are why humans can act smart with little information. Not that we always act smart with little information. But the fact that we can act smart is why we’re capable of succeeding in situations where AI haywires.
Narrative cognition
That root is not magical. It is not consciousness or some ineffable power. It is a physical operation that runs on mechanical parts of the animal neuron that do not exist in computer logic gates and that cannot be engineered, ever, from electronic transistors. My theory is that intuition, common sense, and the rest of Primal Intelligence are driven by narrative cognition. Or to put it in regular speak: The human brain is real-life smart because it thinks in story.
Intuition
Intuition means to know without consciously thinking. Intuition detects a rupture in a standard narrative, driving a break with the past. Intuition arrives as a flash of insight. In fact, it arrives so fast that it can feel supernatural. Operators have a significantly higher rate of intuition than the average Army recruit, and that rate increases over their career. They have learned to activate intuition, often with remarkable results.
Exceptional information
The source is: exceptional information. Exceptional information is defined by the U.S. Army in the manual Mission Command: There is information that results from an extraordinary event, an unseen opportunity, or a new threat. That is exceptional information— exceptional information is an exception to a rule. It is a new rule that can shift the whole world’s story. It’s a blip—until it changes everything. Exceptional information is everywhere. Like a warm-blooded reptile or a rainbow at night, it violates the known laws of its environment, revealing that more can happen than precedent suggests. To recognise it, we need what the Army manual calls initiative, which is another way of saying running ahead of data. AI can’t do this—and while our brain can, it generally doesn’t. Our brains evolved to have the intuition of Jobs, Woz, Curie, and van Gogh. But even though it’s natural for us to spot exceptions, it’s not automatic. The more exceptional the exception, the harder it is for our modern brain to see.
Computers
Computers can’t process exceptional information. When they hit an exception, they skip over it, back to a preprogrammed routine. To a computer, an exception is what proves the rule.
Activating intuition
U.S. special operations has A method for activating intuition. Our brain’s default is to assume that you’ve seen it before. It allows us to stave off distraction and exploit our environment faster. But it deprives us of curiosity, empathy and wonder. If you can’t see what’s exceptional, then treat everything as exceptional. The way you saw the world as a child. No two things in this world are the same. Every picnic, every person, is unique. Assume that everything you see is special. Immerse your brain in a totally new environment, where everything really is exceptional. That’ll jump-start your child way of thinking.
Labels
Logic doesn’t think in the exceptional. It thinks in the opposite: labels. Judgment is how bureaucracies function. Judgment is how computer AI thinks. It uses tags and keywords to label incoming bits of data, allowing for fast sorting, analysis, and retrieval. Judgment is fine if you’re inside a mathematical simulation filled with generic people. But in the real world, it hampers you from latching onto the uncategorisable, stifling your ability to spot exceptional information.
Shift to narrative
Another technique is to shift to narrative. To run Shift to Narrative, start by noticing when your brain makes a judgment: prudent, crazy, beautiful, ugly, awesome, uncool. Focus on the judgment, asking yourself: Where did the judgment come from? Now forget the label and focus on the event, asking yourself: What happens next? This question prompts your brain to translate intuition into original action. Ask What, When, Who, Where, or How. Do not ask why. We all want to get to Why, but the fastest way to miss it is to ask it. By delaying why, you can also do like Woz, van Gogh, and Curie: surface engineering, artistic, or scientific opportunities. Focus on surprises that catch your eye in tech, culture, or nature. Then ask What, When, Where—while resisting the urge to judge.
Imagination
Imagination literally means “to see things that the eyes don’t see.” Imagination’s name denotes this digital process in our mind. Yet this process isn’t all there is to imagination. As spectacular as moving mental images are, they’re preceded by an even more astonishing act, because before a movie can be made, there needs to be a script. That script tells our cortical circuits what sequence of pictures to display.
Fable, myth, fiction, tale
They’re an offshoot of a more fundamental act of creation. Fable, myth, fiction, tale. All of which designate the same activity: story. A story is classified today as a product of imagination. But this is exactly backward. The story is the source of imagination. Story evolved long before language, long, long before language. Millions of years—in fact, hundreds of millions of years—prior to words, gestures, and other forms of oral or visual communication, story was running through our ancestors’ brains. Those brains were using story to do what brains do: think.
Storythinking II
While logic computes what is probable, story creates what is possible. Children naturally think in stories. Storythinking also occurs in the brains of adults—and of chimpanzees, mice, and even crows. It’s the neural mechanism that Operators use to act smart in mayhem. The probable is a pattern that has occurred before, allowing its future likelihood to be calculated from past statistics. The possible is an event that has never happened but could, because it doesn’t contradict the rules of its environment. The possible has two biological advantages over the probable. First, it can accelerate evolution. Second, it can act with initiative in uncertainty.
Asking why
It doesn’t need lots of reliable data. When Operators storythink about the past, they reflect on events they’ve witnessed, asking why. Why did that happen the way it did? Why did it happen at all? When Operators storythink about the future, they imagine events that could happen, asking what if. What if I try this? What if my adversary tries that? Past and future storythinking are connected in the brain by a feedback loop: The more diverse the whys, the more innovative the what ifs, and the more effective the what ifs, the more trustworthy the whys. The same mental narrative can be found in other effective improvisers, from athletes to surgeons to ad-lib comics. The adaptability of athletes, surgeons, and comics comes from their story’s branching future, which gives them the ability to see fresh possibilities.
Storytelling is planning
That’s how Operators flow through misty woods with agile purpose. But how did they learn to storythink this way? How did they train their imagination to be both supple and straight? The way to train imagination is: planning, planning, planning, planning. Planning is the main use of imagination. What’s the reason that plans fail? The reason is that they didn’t consider enough possibilities. Story evolved in the brain to make plans. Plans are invented sequences of actions, the plotted behaviours that enable Operators to strategise—and crows to build tools from sticks. And plans are made by imagination, which is produced in the brain by story, because a story, like a plan, is an invented sequence of actions.
A good plan
A good plan has two features:
- A single long-term goal
- Many possible paths
One why joined to many what ifs. First, most people don’t have a single long-term goal. The typical order issued by an untrained commander is some version of Capture that hill and don’t get anybody killed. Second, most people don’t develop many possible paths. They go all in on Plan A. Even when leaders claim to have a Plan B, it’s usually vague—or Plan A, lightly tweaked. When Plan A breaks—and Plan A will break—the only hope becomes half-Plan B or Plan A with fresh paint.
Strategy is a long-term narrative
Strategy is your long-term narrative. Tactics are the short-term plots you hatch along the way. To consistently reach your goals, your strategy must be precise and your tactics flexible, which is why Special Operators strive for defined strategy, unlimited tactics. They know that the brain cannot plan effectively if it has fifteen primary objectives—or even two primary objectives. They don’t try to summit two mountains at once.
Tap into your life story
What’s the source of the planning genius of special operators? How are they hatching effective plans so fast? The answer can be found in the brain’s most important narrative: our life story. The story we think to ourselves about ourselves. When your past is integrated, it clarifies why you live, investing you with long-range direction. When your future is branched, it widens your potential what-ifs, expanding your possible paths to get there. Your life potential is unique to you. Every human is exceptional.
Emotion
The third primal power is emotion. Instead of being logical, it was biological, based on the brain connection between emotion and story. I do it through feel. When things felt right, keep going. When things feel wrong, adjust. Our emotions help us achieve this narrative by flashing warnings when our past is fracturing or our future is narrowing. To see how it works, let’s start with our brain’s most ancient emotion: fear.
Fear
Fear is core to our brain’s biology. Yet for thousands of years, wise men have warned: Fear is irrational. Don’t listen to it. The wise men are wrong. Fear is smart. Very smart. It is sending you critical intel. That intel is: You have no plan. Without a plan, you have to be lucky. So fear is warning you: You have passed beyond the edge of your intelligence—and are about to become a captive of events!
Combat
Combat stimulates intense fear—so intense that it shortens your depth of vision until you can see only inches in front of your nose. To get out of the box, Operators are taught to push their gaze forward, reaching for the horizon. When you do this, your brain sees past the contracting walls of the fear box, glimpsing opportunities in the great space beyond. To extricate yourself from the quit, push your mental gaze toward the long view—your narrative horizon—by remembering your overall strategy. This big life purpose holds your past together. Once your brain takes that step, it will get quicker at finding its next one.
Movement
As one Operator put it to me: “After the first step, your mind starts to clear. Your first step might not be the best, but as you keep moving, your planning gets better and better. This method of exiting fear is known to Operators as the first-step plan. A first-step plan can feel like a heavy lift when you’re awash with stress. But you can lighten the load by preparing yourself prior to your mission. Take a minute to clarify your strategic objective, making it vivid in your mind. The sharper and more specific the objective, the more rapidly you can make a first-step plan, even in disorienting situations. Stress ranges in intensity, but in all its forms, it stimulates a fright-or-fight response. When that response hits, your brain does a quick gut check: Do I have a plan? To help yourself, remember a time when you made a new plan under pressure. You have done it before; I can do it again.
Go for an emotional reset
For an Emotion Reset to work quickly and reliably, it must be vividly specific. That primordial story is: I am a good person in a good world. Start by focusing on your overall purpose, aka your why. Our brain loves tales about people who go against the rest of the world. This is the most popular storyline of modern books and movies, and it can be found across classic literature too. If you feel irritable, aggressive, or angry, that’s your brain warning: Your plan is breaking. If you feel fear, that’s your brain warning: Your plan is broken. If you feel regret or sadness, that’s your brain warning: You do not have a plan, because you do not know exactly who you are—or what world you’re living in. Emotion is smart because it sees inward. It’s a tool for diagnosing when your own life plan Or, put in terms of your life story, emotion uncovers your why and signals when you need to develop more what ifs; intuition and imagination help you generate those what ifs. But after you’ve generated those what-ifs, how do you know which one to pursue?
Common sense
You must also account for your external environment, which is gauged by the final primal power: common sense. Common sense is famously the ability that distinguishes humans from AI. How can children behave more sensibly than computers? Children act smarter than AI because they can perform a simple mental operation: They can know when they don’t know. As elementary as this operation is for children, it’s impossible for logic. Logic exists in the mathematical present, an eternal state of equation that prompts AI to think that its current knowledge is what it has always known—and all there ever is to know. But when queried about something they don’t know, they don’t know that they don’t know. So they fabricate guilelessly, filling the gap in their knowledge by extrapolating from past trends. Unlike AI, our brain is able to detect when those trends end.
The perimeter of understanding
Story doesn’t occur as timeless math. When our brain finds itself unable to grab onto a firm why for what it sees, or when it imagines two what ifs that conflict, it realises that it has hit the perimeter of its understanding. A story thus gives our brain the power to detect unknown unknowns. There is relevant info you don’t know. When the warning is gentle, it prompts us to start imagining new plans. When the warning is strong, it primes us to switch plans, fast. Common sense thus has a purely negative function: to make us doubt our current plan.
New plans
But this function can be repurposed positively by our brain. Practically, this means that our brain works best when it inverts the behaviour of a computer. A computer seeks verification from data; our brain seeks falsification from the unexpected. Common sense can do more than warn us to change plans. It can select the new plan that best fits our situation.
Techniques and rules to apply
- Get anxious about the future (worry is an intelligent tool)
- Attack the ambush.
- Look for plans that have performed reliably over time.
- When the fundamentals change, junk your most successful plans.
- Decide when it’s time to switch plans.
- Decide which new plan to select.
- Turn an exception into a new rule.
- Leverage conflict. Embrace the tension, pushing your imagination to make a new rule that maintains the old rule’s underlying rationale while including the possibility opened by the exception.
- Eat your enemy. Consume the best aspects of our enemy’s thinking. The more you consume the intelligence of your rivals, the more you accelerate your own innovation.
- Intuition sparks plans.
- Imagination shapes plans.
- Emotion sustains plans.
- Common sense selects plans.
- Match the newness of your plan to the newness of your environment.
- New plans require boldness.
- Peculiarity is the sign of the exceptional.
- To recover your natural powers of intelligent choice, practice being proactive about situational change.
- Only ask experts one question: “Can you prove that my plan will fail?
- Ignore the expert’s other advice. Go where experts can’t say no.
- Unleash the rookie.
- Do not worry about the crowd. Follow your own inner rule. This will shock society.
Embrace tension
Logic is harmony, synchronicity, and unity, making conflict a sign of error and dysfunction. Logic’s predominance in our modern schools and businesses has left us emotionally uncomfortable with conflict and has not equipped us with a method for benefiting from it. Instead of seeking a quick path out of mental tension, do like an Operator: Embrace the tension, pushing your imagination to make a new rule that maintains the old rule’s underlying rationale while including the possibility opened by the exception. In other words: Try to invent a new rule that joins the old rule’s why with the exception’s what if.
Initiative
The computer’s not doing anything wrong. Teams are just doing something it can’t, which is taking the initiative. The computer can only recycle old plans. It creates the illusion of newness by randomly blending past tactics. But it’s all derivative. This is why the Special Ops teams always beat the computer at war-gaming. The computer can master the rules, but the people can pool their intelligence to rewrite the rule book.
School
School should have taught us to think for ourselves. Instead, it taught us to think like school.” High school is filled with standardised tests, and school inevitably trains students to think like it: artificial, abstract, unreal. Education in a classroom was miseducation for life.
Planner, not the plan
a reference to a quote from five-star general Dwight Eisenhower. The quote runs: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Don’t plan in order to make plans. Plan to get better at planning, so that when something unexpected happens, you can create the plan the situation requires. Instead of developing the plan, you must therefore develop the planner.
AI
The more data you give an AI, the better it performs. But also the more likely it is to haywire unpredictably. This paradox is the optimisation trap. It makes decisions quicker and with greater accuracy, until suddenly, it dumps commodities at fire-sale prices, diagnoses healthy newborns with brain tumours, and pilots cargo planes into mountainsides. It happens to logical systems in biological environments. The logical system acquires more and more data, refining its algorithms and going faster and faster. Then abruptly, the environment changes. The change outdates the data in the system. And indeed, it does worse than outdate the data. It makes the data a liability. To follow the data is to march robotically to doom. Because AI is following the data at electric speed, it isn’t marching to doom. It’s racing to doom, spitting out bad decisions at calamitous velocity.
Optimisation is the enemy
Optimisation is thus the best state of affairs and also the worst, producing bursts of total dominance that abruptly shatter. Biology learned this long ago: Hyperspecialised organisms flourish briefly then go extinct, while generalist species trot stolidly along. As long as life calls for math, AI crushes humans. It’s the king of big-data choices. The moment, though, that life requires common sense or imagination, AI tumbles off its throne.
Innovation
Every innovation, no matter how brilliantly revolutionary, thus initially appears half-formed.This can make the innovation seem deformed, prompting us to throw it away—or equally imprudently, to throw away the abnormal half. When we do this, we lop off what is really new, falling into the clutches of expert bias.
Communication
- When the brain gets scared, it becomes susceptible to other people’s narratives.
- Fear-based communication is fragile.
- Stories that spark our imagination become integral to our personal narrative.
That is why people buy Nike. Not because they’re brainwashed by the ad but because the ad prompts them to imagine their own Just Do It future. That future becomes part of their biography, enduring when the fears roused by other ads have faded away.
Stories techniques
- Start in the middle. This contradicts logic. According to logic, effective ads start at the beginning. Sounds smart, but story did not evolve for linear information transfer. What makes them smart is that they run middle → beginning → end. Here’s how. Story Maybe it’s someone behaving in a flabbergasting way. This, your brain realises, is the story’s middle. By tapping into this storythinking mechanism of middle → beginning → end, you can engage your audience to co-create the future with you.
- Focus on exceptions to rules. What catches your brain’s attention, stimulating it to imagine why and what if, is the opposite of the universal: an anomaly.
- Write in riddle. A riddle connects two things that contradict. (What gets wetter the more that it dries? Or what has a bed but never sleeps? Or what do the rich need but the poor have?) This logic breaker stimulates curiosity and then suspense, making us want to get the answer faster.
- End with the beginning. Prompt your audience to wonder why. Shut up and let your audience imagine what if.
Commander’s intent
The Green Berets have a three-step formula for Commander’s intent. Step 1: tell your team the goal of their mission (that is, the story’s end). Step 2, explain the why of their mission (that is, the story’s beginning). Step 3, close your mouth, leaving your team to invent the middle themselves.
Failed internal comms
Whether orders delivered by military commanders, directives issued by CEOs, or instructions given by parents are usually blamed by the communicator on the audience. In most cases, the communicator departed from the Green Berets’ Churchillian formula. The communicator either wasn’t clear about the goal or wasn’t clear about the why. If your internal comms aren’t working, start by making sure that you haven’t given your team two (or more) goals. The second-most-common error is to provide a goal without a why, so that when an unexpected obstacle (or opportunity) arises, your team isn’t able to anticipate what you would do, creating hesitation, inertia, or disconnected extemporisation. They’re missing communication’s final ingredient: trust. Before you open your mouth, commit to sharing the full and honest story of your life.
Authenticity
Simply ask yourself: What facts about my life am I afraid to share? Green Berets refer to it as authenticity. Authenticity isn’t something the brain can detect. But the brain is very good at detecting a lack of authenticity.
Produce communion
Communion is the deep essence of communication. Authentic togetherness. To discover them, start by telling your story to yourself, honestly and completely. Then commit to sharing it. Not with everyone, not at first. But with people who aren’t evasive or defensive. This will establish emotional security. And in its bond of love, you’ll find true communication.
Leadership
Your whole life, you’ve been taught that you need education. Education is a Roman word that means “to be led.” It means that you were born to follow. Management is a medieval term that means “to steer a horse.” In modern business schools, this steering is often styled as a source of leadership. The most basic is authoritative leadership, or telling others what to do. More nuanced is participative leadership, or working collaboratively to build consensus. Most prized is transformational leadership, or converting people to a shared mission in which they exit their egos to fight for a bigger dream. But none of these are leadership. They are all still management.
Leadership vs management
Leadership is taking the first step into tomorrow. It’s grabbing opportunities that other people dismiss or don’t see.
- Management trains you to monitor others, but leaders have their eyes on the future ahead, not the legion behind.
- Management trains you to stick to the data, but leaders realise that in changing times, data inhibits adaptation.
- Leaders understand that teams of autonomous planners do not splinter into chaos. They extend insights and reinforce breakthroughs.
- Managers seek orchestrated harmony. Leaders seek spontaneous self-direction.
- Management culminates in benevolent autocracy. Leadership, in respectful democracy.
- While leaders are born, managers are produced by education.
- If you want to be a manager, keep going to school. If you want to be a leader, return to the beginning.
Leaders are innovators
Leaders are innovators. They see the future faster. They show the way by spotting the exceptional first. Next, leaders are resilient. Next, leaders are decision-makers. Next, leaders are communicators. And finally, leaders are coaches. Cautious leaders mortgage the future. They kill your tomorrow by safeguarding their today. This is what Special Operators mean when they call themselves unconventional. They break the law not out of impertinence but out of reverence. They know that the law is groupthink, fear, and inactivity. Pursuing unproven opportunities is the definition of leadership. Leadership exists to take the next step into the future.
Vision
Imagination’s first function is the one most associated with entrepreneurial leadership, yet the second is equally crucial. Like “define the problem,” define the strategy hones our purpose, but instead of confining us to logical probabilities, it launches us after a single long-term possibility. It operates, in short, as a source of vision. Find the answers by building your bookshelf, like Bell, Shannon, and Goddard. Sharpen your imagination with realistic fiction. Look beyond patterns. Anticipate horizons.
When you can create a story that works, you can change the future
Special Operations and I share an unconventional belief. We believe that to activate the parts of the human brain that are smarter than a computer, it’s necessary to venture beyond modern psychology into a science more ancient and imaginative. The brain thinks in narrative, so we can discover how the brain operates by studying the mechanics of story. Strategy was the story of what the organisation wanted to do, operations was the story of what the organisation was actually doing, and marketing was the story of what the organisation wanted people to think it was doing. In successful organisations, the three stories are aligned.
Asymmetry and imagination
A brilliance at IQ tests and statistics does not translate into brilliance at life. Computers could not see the future, nor could management or ideation. They all relied on data. That’s why our tomorrow doesn’t lie in design; it lies in the asymmetry. That’s why our tomorrow doesn’t lie in management; it lies in leaders with vision. That’s why our tomorrow doesn’t lie in computers and their statistical brilliance; it lies in human imagination. Imagination can invent plans that math and data can’t.
