“An implicit model is a non-conceptual, embodied representation of our environment – we navigate it safely because our body, our senses, our social norms, our tools and artefacts guide us through it.”
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To act effectively, we need to make sense of our situation11Or, as Dave Snowden puts it, “We make sense of the world in order to act in it.”
Strategy is a set of choices about the use of a system’s resources to maximise its chances to fulfil its purpose in a given environment, be that survival, serving a need, or gaining a position of power
Even if we’re not aware of it, strategy is de facto always an iterative learning process, going explicitly or implicitly through the steps perceive – make sense – decide – act.
In our experience, we often fail to recognise the cyclical nature of strategising – we don’t support and harness the learning that is implicitly always happening.
The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects. This simplified model of reality allows one to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem solving.88Rumelt
An implicit model is a non-conceptual, embodied representation of our environment – we navigate it safely because our body, our senses, our social norms, our tools and artefacts guide us through it.
An explicit model is a purposeful description of our environment, often in the form of a story about causes and effects (a causal model), sometimes expressed in mathematical terms or as a simulation.
Most of our implicit models, heuristics that have evolved biologically and culturally and that we often share with others, are quite resilient and deal well with unexpected situations – except when the environment changes in a way that fundamentally breaks them.
our explicit models fail more often than the implicit ones they are meant to replace. They frequently don’t create coherence or, worse, only give an appearance of coherence where there really is none, turning into conspiracy narratives and delusions.
Making sense means establishing coherence: Our models help us understand how the details of our situation are connected and how they fit into the broader context.
the Great Decoherence: an era in which once-reliable narratives no longer seem to “fit” together, leaving a fragmented and, at times, senseless reality in their wake.
enabled and amplified by a few factors:
- Deliberate misinformation strategies, particularly in online spaces, muddy the waters, creating echo chambers where memes proliferate and facts lose their meaning.
- Our digital environments per se – designed to maximise engagement through algorithms – amplify extreme or polarising content because it is the most engaging, reinforcing and deepening existing biases and divisions.
- Confusion surrounds political alliances and ideologies as society enters a hegemonic crisis, during which political constellations shift unpredictably, leaving society without a clear direction.1414Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci introduced this concept to describe periods of ideological instability when dominant systems of power lose credibility and no coherent new system has yet replaced them. See our analysis of the crisis of Neoliberalism for more on this.
As traditional sensemaking fails, people turn to over-coherence: overly simplified explicit models that aim to explain the complex changes around us in everyday terms, suggesting a level of explanatory coherence our understanding of complex systems can never realistically attain.
The structural problem of these narratives is that they offer explanations on the wrong level of abstraction: complex systems (e.g. societies) can’t be understood by looking at individual components (e.g. alleged conspirators).
Paul Cilliers once stated, “No matter how we construct the model, it will be flawed, and what is more, we do not know in which way it is flawed.”
what Venkatesh Rao calls “grey lore” – “generative, internally consistent, learnable system[s] of thought that take some skill and time to master”, but in the end, amount to not much more than “usable bullshit”.