Why it helps to think in models, not facts

“You have two minds. One is conscious. The other one is categorically unconscious. One is present, the other one is behind the curtain. One displays your ego, the other one represses the notions that violate or contradict your ego. One is light, the other one is dark,” writes Rachel Mariotti.

Go beyond the obvious

Conscious mind is like the screen, or keyboard on your laptop, it’s what you see, on the surface. Unconscious mind is the programming language, the software, in the central processing unit that is hidden, but controlling just about everything. The power behind the throne.

At the risk of trivialising Jung’s thinking - he believed that we all have a ‘Shadow’ deep within our unconscious. That repressed, hidden, or darker part of one’s personality. Jung argued that ignoring these traits leads to projecting them onto others. Ultimately, he believed one has to confront one’s inner darkness to grow.

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Same goes with the enterprises you deal with. On the surface ‘they delight and exceed customers’ expectations’. But in reality, behind the advertising hype and the jargon, their product may be shoddy, with systems that rarely work right. Root cause problem is not the behaviour, but an inability to dig down, and confront what is really happening below the surface in the business systems.

What is required is ‘learning how to learn’, often called double – loop learning, that awareness of recognising how a system really works.

For centuries, alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold — not through magic, but by unlocking the hidden potential within metals themselves. Their approach was to try and understand the structure of matter.

Try building a model

One of the ways in business to solve a pressing problem is to try and build a model of how it works. Visualise it, map it out on paper. Use system thinking to define the inputs, the environment that the system operates in, the outputs, and feedback loops. Donella Meadow’s practical book Thinking in Systems has become a classic guide, readily available in paperback.

Helps to be able to compress complexity into a model. University of Cambridge in England, founded roughly 800 years ago “has produced an extraordinary number of thinkers who became powerful because beyond simply collecting tonnes of facts, they learned to build abstractions that captured the deep structure between webs of facts.”

Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes, Stephen Hawkings and Jane Goodall are but a few who took on the university’s approach to problem solving, with the need to understand the underlying structure.

“And the great thinker Alan Turing, father of modern computing is a perfect example. During his time at King's College, Cambridge, he conceived of what is now called the Turing machine, a universal mathematical model of computation that could imitate all possible calculating devices. And that's an astonishing act of compression. You see the amazing thing is that he didn't merely describe one machine. He abstracted the idea of computability itself. Cambridge's own account calls it one of the most influential mathematical abstractions of the 20th century. But this is exactly the kind of thinking most people and most students never train. Most remain only at the level of being able to describe ideas in terms of examples, anecdotes or isolated instances. Yet a Cambridge style mind asks a different question. What is the minimal structure underneath all these cases? What's the model here? What is the smallest set of rules that explains the biggest range of phenomena?” says scholar Stephen Petro.

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Cambridge's culture, partially through the supervision system, in small group tutorials rewards the person who is proactive, in action, trying to derive, test, and rebuild things from the inside, rather than merely repeating what was said in the lecture.

But how can you apply this in your business?

Helps to rethink, reframe the business question or problem and highlight the specific step where you're getting stuck. This will allow you with laser precision to identify the right approach you need to engage in, going forward. Your goal is not to be right on the first pass.

Instead, your goal is to build a mind that knows how to solve business problems proactively, before the help even arrives. And, that is much closer to how Cambridge actually trains people, not relying on passive notetaking. But instead, understanding the underlying structure of the problem and dynamics of the system.

Are our business problems just fate, or our lack of understanding? William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar put it best: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.

David [email protected] is a director at aCatalyst Consulting.