Tough to see around the next corner with straight line thinking.
Look out the window. Do you see any straight lines in nature? Is thinking in a linear way, our built-in default mode of business intelligence? Or, should one also understand systems? Why is it that our most obvious choice is often wrong? Does black and white exist on the management palette — or are business decisions often shades of gray, not to mention the shocking red and warning sign yellow? Do we prefer simple straight lines, often assuming that doubling an effort yields double the result?
Need more than a hammer
Straight line thinking is required hammer in your management toolbox. But it should be one tool among many. Straight line thinking goes from point A to B, simply a step-by-step process where ideas follow a sequential, cause and effect path.
We assume that the future is a direct extension of the past and that a single action consistently produces a predictable outcome. Being data-driven and rational requires established rules, consistency, and formulas.
Risk of straight line thinking is that in a binary way, complex scenarios are often reduced to straightforward ‘yes or no’ or ‘true or false’ answers.
Linear thinking works for straightforward, predictable tasks like following an audit checklist, a routine project management, or a recipe. Advantage is in clarity and focus: cutting through the mental clutter to do a task quickly, without getting distracted by fuzzy tangential ideas.
Catch is that one risks a blindness to complexity. Business world rarely operates in straight lines. Assuming continuous growth or steady trends can cause you to miss sudden disruptions, feedback loops, or delays.
Linear thinking is our mind’s default [factory setting] mode cognitive bias — where the risk is that we mistakenly expect straight-line, proportional relationships between inputs and outputs. In practice, complex business and economic systems operate in a non-linear way.
Things like your firm’s growth, economic development, fuel efficiency, or customer retention often follow curves. Most things move in cycles where ancient ‘yin and yang’ phases prevail.
No, perfectly straight lines don’t exist in nature. But there are examples that come pretty close. For instance, a spider’s silk with tension creates incredibly straight strands. Structure of the molecular lattice of minerals like quartz can create sharp, linear boundaries.
Light travels in straight paths in a vacuum, though gravity curves it. Gravity causes plumb lines to hang vertically, following a straight path – but it helps to see the big picture, the system.
Constantly reframe
At the heart of systems thinking is problem reframing. Many managers solve the wrong problem because they frame challenges from a single straight line perspective.
Systems thinkers continuously reframe problems to reveal hidden interdependencies. And it’s not just a one off event. Smart managers continuously polish problem statements as new system dynamics emerge – which is just about all the time.
If Red Oak Bank introduces AI assisted customer service then what will the competition do? If the bank begins to offer interest on their current accounts will others follow? Sometimes the competition can be pretty straight line predicable which can be used to gain an advantage.
Better to take systems perspective, crafting an offer, addressing the customer’s pressing problem, with an injection of — often counter intuitive — out of the box thinking.
Straight line thinking predominates in business plans. If we open a new branch in the Blue Ocean Mall our top line revenues will increase by 7 percent. Strategy is another universe, involving another level of thinking. What most organisations have is really is a plan called a strategy. A strategy is not a plan.
Kama Sutra of strategy
Lawrence Freedman’s book Strategy: A History is a fluid, and pragmatic overview of how humans have sought to shape their environments. Essence of his thinking dismantles the idea of rigid, long-term planning, arguing instead that true strategy is highly adaptive and governed by the starting point, not the end point. And never a straight line.
Freedman traces strategic thought from primate groups and ancient texts like Homer’s Iliad, through Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz, up to modern corporate management and game theory.
Over 28 chapters, in almost 700 pages, Freedman covers the idea of strategy from a wealth of perspectives, almost from the beginning of time.
Freedman rails against overly complex, long-term blueprints. History shows what happens is that opponents always push back and chance events, unpredicted random events disrupt environments, so strategies must constantly recalibrate.
End of the day strategy is about taking a systems perspective, shrewdly balancing available means against desired outcomes, to extract more power from a situation than the starting balance would suggest.
Henry Mintzberg has long challenged straight-line’ thinking, particularly through his critique of formal strategic planning saying, “strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.”
Mintzberg argues that formal planning is analytical and linear, whereas strategic thinking is synthetic and creative. Rather than a straight line from formulation to implementation, Mintzberg believes business strategies evolve in real-time saying: “Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.”
Best profitable plan to corner the market might be to go straight to a real ‘wow’ imaginative strategy.
