6Strategy as Paradox
‘A thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.’— Soren Kierkegaard
Rosling, in his book, Factfulness (2018), wrote,
Humans have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. But we know life is rarely like that. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains.
Most strategies are built on specific, fixed views about what is really an unpredictable future, forcing leaders to commit to inflexible strategies regardless of how the future might unfold. It is this commitment to a fixed view within the reality of uncertainty that is the cause of ...
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