The insufficiency of concepts

Citation

Marren, P. (2003), "The insufficiency of concepts", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 24 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2003.28824faf.001

The insufficiency of concepts

Patrick Marren is a strategic consultant with the Futures Strategy Group. Clients he has worked for have included the US Coast Guard, NASA, the FAA, the Panama Canal Commission, various aspects of the US military, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, Marrenp@aol.com

In this column I would like to discuss the problem of problem definition.

There is, in the everyday life of the strategist, no way to define a problem so that you can be sure that you have prepared for all eventualities. This is the sad and sorry truth about strategy. I suspect that this thesis cannot be proved, but I also suspect that it is as sure as death and taxes.

No planning "methodology'' can ever guarantee that you have covered all your bases, no matter what problem you are trying to address. In connection with this topic, let me share with you one of the most provocative quotations that I have ever run across.

Franz Kafka, in addition to being one of the seminal fiction writers of the last century, was also a lawyer for a workers' compensation insurance company in Prague. By all accounts, he was an unusually conscientious and effective claims executive.

(I am fairly certain that he, along with Wallace Stevens, a vice president of the Hartford Insurance Company, constitute the entire pantheon of great insurance claims executives/literary giants. If I am wrong in this, please, please contact me at the e-mail below because I would be delighted and intrigued to be proven wrong in this. The fact that I once worked in this area and have certain literary pretensions has absolutely nothing to do with my interest therein.)

At any rate, in one of the many notebooks in which he used to scribble down great thoughts, or (usually stillborn) beginnings of short stories or novels, Kafka wrote the following sentence: "All human error is impatience, the premature abandonment of what is methodical, the apparent fencing off of the apparent thing.''

This quote is great not because what he wrote was perfectly true, but because it at one and the same time pointed out an important inherent flaw in human "problem definition'', and also exemplified that very flaw. Because not all human error is "impatience'', not by a long shot. Many are the errors of excessive patience in a wrong course of action, and since all humans die, the "premature abandonment of the methodical'' is inevitable. In addition, since every sentence, indeed every word, uttered or written by human beings is inaccurate and incomplete, every period of every sentence is an instance of a "premature abandonment of the methodical''. Every utterance of a human since the invention of speech is an instance of Kafka's "impatience''. Therefore … so is Kafka's sentence.

But Kafka's statement, though admittedly an instance of the "impatience'' it apparently decries, illustrates in its very imperfection the conundrum of all "problem definition''. Even the best definition of a problem, by the greatest of advisers (and there are many great problem definitions by many great advisers), will eventually prove inadequate. Like Hegel's "Thesis'', and like all human beings, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. But since we die, we must "fence off'' reality as best we can – we cannot tackle all of reality at once. We have to make useful errors and gross simplifications every day. Every human concept must ultimately fail; that does not mean, however, that we are obliged to stop creating concepts – quite the opposite, in fact.

Buddhists have a concept – let us openly name it as such – called "the insufficiency of concepts''. This is their way of saying that God, or the Buddha, or Nirvana, the ultimate nature of reality, any of the ultimate things, cannot be grasped through merely human concepts. If they were able to be captured exactly by a human concept, then they would not deserve the name "ultimate''. (It may be thought irrelevant, or even sacrilegious, to compare the ideas of religion to mere questions of commerce. Yet, as Thich Nhat Hanh titles one of the chapters in his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, "Religious experience is human experience''. Either everyday life, and therefore commerce, is suffused by the ultimate, or nothing is.)

I could cite another quote from another interesting writer, to illustrate this "insufficiency of concepts''. In the Atlantic Monthly, December 2001, "Looking the world in the eye'', Robert D. Kaplan wrote: "The most telling passage in [Samuel Huntington's first well-known political work] The Soldier and the State is in the preface, where the 29-year-old Huntington came to a conclusion that formed the template of an entire career. On the one hand, he conceded that 'actual personalities, institutions, and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories'. But on the other, he argued passionately that 'neat logical categories are necessary if man is to think profitably about the real world in which he lives and to derive from it lessons for broader application and use'. A scholar, in order to say anything significant, is 'forced to generalize'. The true measure of a theory is not that it accounts for all the relevant facts but that it accounts for those facts 'better than any other theory'. Those who concentrate on the imperfections of a theory, without coming up with a better alternative, are helping no one.''

Now, you may or may not agree that Samuel Huntington's latest thesis, "The clash of civilizations'', accounts for the facts of the post-9/11 world "better than any other theory''. Yet it is difficult to dispute his early thesis that no particular theory, no matter how elegant, can be expected to embrace the entirety of reality, even when only a small portion of that infinitely rich reality has been "fenced off'' for analysis. Huntington's statement breaks down, ultimately, to Kafka's: a historian is forced to "fence off'' a portion of infinite reality in order to analyze it and draw general conclusions from it. Even if his logic is perfect, that very "fencing off'' guarantees that his theories will fall prey to the error of "impatience, the premature abandonment of what is methodical''. Because to be methodical would mean continuing unto infinity, which is impossible for mortal creatures; it would also mean never reaching a pragmatic "good enough'' conclusion that might be useful to human beings in the real world.

In other words, we fence off reality because it is too big and too chaotic; we play the game of pretending that the fenced off portion of reality is the whole of reality; and we are inevitably proven wrong when a bird flies over our fence or a rabbit digs underneath it. Then we are forced to tear our fence down and build another, hopefully larger, fence.

Leaving aside the more cosmic implications of Kafka's statement, we on earth are left with a seemingly bleak prospect. Nothing we do in the area of "problem definition'' can be definitive. Any concept we cook up, any model of the situation we invent to tackle the problem, will ultimately prove faulty. Is there nothing we can do? In short, there is. We must, if we are to have any chance of solving problems, be prepared to alter our conception of the situation as soon as our "concepts'' reach their inevitable obsolescence, and come up with new, more elegant and accurate ways of seeing the situation. This is where inductive, rather than deductive, reasoning comes in.

Deductive reasoning, as its name implies, is concerned with deducing. It requires a group of accepted axioms from which inferences can be drawn. The general and special theories of relativity constitute one such set of axioms (or two). Physicists the world over have been busy deducing corollaries from Einstein's theories for almost a century now. Recently, however, Einstein's set of axioms has shown signs of approaching obsolescence. Experiments conducted within the past 20 years have contradicted some aspects of Einstein's model. This model is so fundamental to the entire way that physicists view the universe that it cannot simply be discarded without an alternative model to take its place. Therefore we seem to be in a transitional phase, one in which deduction from the accepted physical model is losing its relevance.

When deduction fails, when it provides false answers, there are two possibilities. Either the logic used to draw the inferences is flawed, in which case the model from which they are drawn may be assumed still to be valid; or the model itself is flawed, in which case a new model is necessary. Yet pure deduction cannot produce a new model in any sphere of human endeavor. What is needed is induction – creative, "right-brain'', lateral thinking – so that an entirely new and more accurate picture of reality can be created. Once a new model is in place, such as Einstein's (seemingly illogical, in 1905) acceptance that the speed of light is constant and that therefore the fabric of space-time must be pliable, then a new round of "left-brain'' deduction can begin.

Where does such induction come from? Must we wait helplessly for divine intervention to strike some patent clerk in Switzerland before we find blessed release for our deductive compulsion? In fact, although there is always some sort of magic involved in finding new ways to view reality, the sacrament of creativity is one that is potentially open to each of us.

The first thing we must do is to disengage ourselves from our attachments to certain treasured ways of looking at the world. Whether you are a capitalist or a socialist, a monetarist or a Keynesian, whether you are a gold bug or a CAPM valuation fan, you must admit that the ordinary course of history has made hash out of accepted ideologies. If you truly want to be prepared for the future, that nonexistent commodity, you must free yourself from your particular ideology, which you undoubtedly label "common sense''. Reality does not tolerate categorization or pigeonholing very well. Despite the best efforts of common wisdom, evil empires collapse. Global capitalism triumphs. Adulterous presidents prosper. Rabidly anti-communist "B'' movie actors end cold wars. Right-wing republican presidents impose wage and price controls. This is the nature of reality: it does not particularly care what you think. It continues to act, regardless of received opinion (yours), or rank prejudice (theirs).

There are far too many rigidly held opinions out there, in the humble opinion of this right brained strategic planning consultant. Strongly held opinion may have its uses, but it is very destructive of attempts to anticipate change. Reality is not republican or democratic, liberal or conservative, left brain or right brain, digital or analog. Change respects no ideology.

The answer, then, must be to throw out, at least for the sake of argument, all of the logic that you have spent your entire career carefully constructing and living by. (You may wish to retrieve it after you have finished your planning exercise; most of my clients, even the greatest, seem to do this after I have left the building.) If you want to have any chance of success in anticipating future discontinuities, you should lay aside your belief, to take an example from politics, that only republican administrations can foster free trade, deregulation, and laissez-faire economics. Or that only democratic administrations will champion the lowly, extend social safety nets, forge new treaties to reduce stockpiles of weapons, increase the size of governments, or impose wage and price controls.

It may be true that your logic is correct: that democrats are tree-hugging peaceniks, and republicans are steely realistic power wielders. Yet reality is so large that it may cause your tree hugger to deregulate industry, or your realist to bargain down weapons to very low levels. If you want to anticipate such anomalies, you should banish your own ideology from your strategic planning process, as far as that is possible. As Kafka might tell us, to completely banish prejudice is impossible; but the imperfect attempt is essential to developing alternative and unexpected theses of how the future might evolve.

I would draw the following corollary to Kafka: that although much, not all, "human error results from impatience, the premature abandonment of what is methodical, the apparent fencing off of the apparent thing'', such error is inevitable and not to be feared, but only to be taken into account and guarded against, as far as possible. Abandonment of the methodical is not only inevitable, it is necessary.

For, "in the long run'', as another philosopher once wrote, "we all die''.