The Fox and the Hedgehog

Hi there,

Hope you're well.

I'm great, thank you. I spent most of last week at Rottnest Island with the family. Great weather, nature, exercise and lots of splashing in the water with the children. 

I also got the opportunity to get into two books; Helping People Change – Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth by Boyatzis, Smith and Oosten, and On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis. Different focus, both equally enjoyable to read. The first, Lizzie will come back to share some learning from. The second, I will share something from. 

The book focuses on a statement which goes, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

Who are you, and who should you be when making important decisions? Foxes "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way". Hedgehogs "relate everything to a single central vision".

In a study, covering 27,000 predictions on world politics from 284 experts, it's found that the more fox-like experts were way better at predicting the future. It seemed that the "stitching together of diverse sources of information" produced higher accuracy than focused grand predictions. It also turned out that the foxes, being more suspicious of ideas and never wanting to adhere to a single vision, seldom was invited to discuss their ideas on TV. And so, without a single vision, too occupied with the surroundings, one cannot move forward efficiently – one cannot rally the troops.

Of course, we have to balance the two – the fox and the hedgehog. In the book, Gaddis, explains it all with a (probably fake) speech by Abraham Lincoln from the movie Lincoln:

"A compass... will point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp..., then what's the use of knowing true north?"

Also enacted by Michael Scott of The Office US when relying a bit too much on his GPS.