Centaurs
In Greek mythology centaurs were half human, half horse - they had the speed and strength of the latter, and the intelligence of the former.
Centaurs today aren’t flesh and blood horse-humans, but technology-humans.
They first arose in chess, where Garry Kasparov concluded that “weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkable, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process”. Not surprisingly, chess centaurs started beating grandmasters regularly.
Today, we have centaurs everywhere: in the military centaurs do threat assessment as well as missile targetting, the weather forecasts you receive are centaur generated and, in the near future, we’ll see centaurs peer-reviewing academic publications, determining precedents in law, and designing buildings. Indeed, in a property transaction I’m involved with right now, I happen to know that both the town planning approvals we’ll need and the credit assessments we went through to borrow the funds required are both centaur-based.
The benefits of centaurs are not just that they’re fast, but they accommodate huge numbers of variables and, most importantly, their complementary modes of cognition give confidence to decisions that humans must ultimately be accountable for.
Question: In your business, how can you build centaurs that dramatically heighten what a computer or a human can do alone?
Deeply validating
I’m still reflecting on the extraordinary experience I had last week in Miami, FL and, as numerous people have asked me about it, here’s what happened.
(But first, it wasn’t the hour I forced myself to watch Fox News on the eve of the US’s mid-term election, although that was a palpably physical pain — watching such bias masquerading as ‘news’).
Instead, during a three-day consultants’ conference I was ‘on stage’ for 90 minutes, questioned by our host and business mentor, Alan Weiss, and by a couple of dozen highly experienced and very successful global consultants.
Consultants ask great questions and this group knocked it out of the park. They asked how I create “decision confidence” for my clients; how to ask ‘dumb questions’ that cut through noise; how to amplify the effects of a breakthrough idea. I talked very frankly to the large group about the value of incompleteness and ‘not knowing’ and the key events that made me comfortable in my own skin (some of them not at all comfortable).
If it sounds self-indulgent, it wasn’t.
Instead, I felt buoyant and uplifted — and also deeply validated in a way I’d never experienced professionally.
Why? Because I realised how rare it was to talk in-depth, with intelligent and insightful peers, for a sustained period, about not just success factors, but failure points as well.
So what exactly did I learn, or have reinforced, about myself?
That my innate curiosity forces me to probe and ask questions, to get to root causes, and core motivations.
That my superpower is turning complex or abstract ideas into spatial pictures (which end up as frameworks or visuals).
That I’m rarely intimidated or fearful and, in fact, welcome the precipice of uncertainty so I’m willing often to take intellectual and social risks.
Beyond my own 90 minutes in the chair, I was one of the question-askers for another five consultants and I learned at least as much by listening to their lifelong a-ha moments. Imagine TED talks on steroids, with vulnerability raised tenfold.
Question: How can you turn attention onto individuals in your team and deeply validate their ‘superpowers’?
Resolved
Are you familiar with the feeling when you resolve a complex idea?
For me, it’s an almost physical sensation, a release, a sigh, an exhalation. While away, I read the new English translation of Vassily Grossman’s novel, The People Immortal, written in 1943, just when the German advance into Russia was turned around.
In only 200 pages, Grossman captures deeply human moments of the war experience, including, at one point, a beautiful description of how a commander, Mertsalov, resolved an impossibly complex set of battlefield issues and came up with a brilliant solution that annihilated a far superior German force.
"A mathematician or physicist is often overwhelmed in the first stages of his research by the complex and obstinate contradictions he has discovered in some apparently simple and ordinary phenomenon. He struggles to reconcile the various elements of this phenomenon, but they continue to contradict one another, to slip away from his grasp.
And then, as a reward for this arduous work of analysis, a clear and simple thought unexpectedly dawns on him, dispelling all confusion and complexity and yielding the only correct, astonishingly simple and irrefutable solution. This moment is what we call creative thinking. And what Mertsalov went through, as he wrestled with the problem before him, was no different from this. Never, perhaps, had he known such excitement and joy."
I agree with Grossman that this is true creativity: wrestling with alternatives until a single clear solution presents itself. And, in that moment, knowing it’s right.
Question: How can you deliberately exercise your - and your team’s - creative powers to resolve complex issues?
As always, the human part of me loves knowing that you’ve enjoyed reading, so please click the ‘heart’ so that the centaur knows that you’re here.
And, do pass on 5MSM to colleagues and friends whom you think will enjoy these weekly insights.
Until we meet again, enjoy stretching the boundaries of what it is to be human, and see you here next Friday.
Andrew
Aviv was excited about the TL in Miami! Bet it was better than most, if only because of the speakers' and audience members' vulnerability.