Insight is not a function of the landscape. It’s a function of the structure of your current neural network. Stop looking outward for answers. We know that the gorilla is invisible (Chabris, C. F., & Simons, D. J. (2010)) when the conditions are right. What makes the gorilla unseeable is not the nature of the gorilla, but the prejudice wired into our brains by flawed heuristics. We are an outstanding pattern-recognizing organism. The very best generalized one so far. The irony is that we are also completely hackable. Our pattern recognition software is iterative.
It may be your Constitutional right to believe that we are the result of one instantaneous, divine act of creation, but the evidence is overwhelming that we are a result of billions of layers of incremental improvement. Our organs, particularly the Eye and the Appendix are living records of this. Our neural pathways too. New things threaten our sense of context in a world where ‘new’ renders ‘old’ less useful. This is why old people tend to resent and criticize the young – they are insecure.
Once in a while, outliers pull away from consensus and stake new boundaries. We generally punish them, and then later venerate them, because we base our cognition of new things on previous patterns. We pitchfork the innovators for daring to break the wheel, and then we raise monuments to them when it is safe because the change has become acceptable.
Disruption is a threat precisely because its primary strategic asset is the self-assurance of the target that it is superior. When attacking a vertically integrated giant, surely the most powerful force is momentum? I call this Predjujitsu – using the force of your own limited judgment against you. The Legacy systems in banking are a prime example. Massive investment into and reliance upon these systems impact the bank’s ability to see a future without them. This blind spot is a perfect asymmetry for a disruptor to attack. I love the new entrants into banking. Not because I want banks to fail – but because there is a fire being lit under an oligopoly that is long overdue. This will continue to happen where new thinking is able to rise above legacy mindsets and see profit pools accessible by oblique angles.
The question for today is: are your heuristics up to date? Here’s the exercise: take two or three of your most dearly held beliefs about the world write them down. then try and disprove them. Go to Google, find out if there is any evidence to support or weaken them. What can happen? Either your beliefs stand up to the test, in which case, they’re worthy. Or, you realize that maybe you’ve been holding onto bad ideas for no good reason. Either way, you end the day a little smarter.
By John Vlismas
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