Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, was interviewed on CBC Radio’s The Current on May 13 (To listen, go here, scroll down to Part 3 and click the play button on the audio icon. To download a podcast, go here and scroll down to Drunkard’s Walk.) The New York Times published a helpful review when the book came out last June.

Mlodinow’s specialty is probability and statistics and he presents one of the strongest versions of the view that the world is vastly unpredictable, which renders many of our efforts at planning and strategy foolish. Interestingly, as so often is the case, he doesn’t really go far enough.

Leaving aside the complex debate about whether there is any such thing as true randomness rather than simply a mass of interconnected causes and conditions too vast to be encompassed (and perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference in the end), what Mlodinow doesn’t account for is something like shih.

He doesn’t delve into how deep our ability to perceive patterns at a subtle level may be. He doesn’t give much quarter to the power of contemplative mind, to intuition. We are presented essentially as victims. Yet others, such as Norman Schwarzkopf, when faced with vast complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability (randomness if you like) have concluded that character, your way of being, the basic momentum and direction you have developed to date is what you can rely on. Through the deep knowing and cultivation of our basic being that is encouraged by the Sun Tzu, we can turn the tables on randomness and interconnectedness. It’s the basic ground rather than the enemy.

Barry Boyce

In the June 18, 2008, Toronto Globe and Mail, business book reviewer Harvey Schachter reviewed Stall Points by Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever, Yale University Press. The book talks about how successful companies hit a takeoff point, and soar. But eventually, most meet a stall point, where suddenly everything seems to fall apart. The review mentions that the authors make the point that “it is the assumptions that you believe the most deeply or that you have held true for the longest time that are likely to prove your undoing.” Here’s what I wrote to Harvey about that:

I am continually shocked in my consulting work with how blind even the most successful and effective leaders are to the limitations of their own views. Jerome Groopman talks about it in How Doctors Think. The neuroscientists talk about it in discussing the problems with cognitive bias.

In Rules of Victory we talk about it in terms of View, and how that leads (or doesn’t) to synchronized and effective Practices and Actions.

One of my favorite images in talking about this is the experience of using a flashlight on a dark night: It simultaneously sharpens perception at the focus but renders the periphery more opaque. Since so many answers lie somewhere in the periphery, our ability to see and understand what’s lies out there needs to be expanded. This is akin to what Olson and Bever present in seeing the limitations of the assumptions underlying one’s strategy.

James Gimian