Descartes and the Search for New Ideas

[This is the blog version of my monthly column for June 2009]

Most organizations these days are doing too much stuff.

Activities undertaken in a robust economy have lost their shine. Tossing off marginal products that chew up limited resources has become a common theme.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners actually do quit. Seth Godin points out in The Dip that knowing what to quit and what to keep is a key element in success.

And this process of clearing away over-burden isn’t new. At the suggestion of a Facebook friend, I have been reading the Meditations, Objections and Replies of 17th Century philosopher Rene Descartes.

Descartes wrote in 1641:

Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them. And thus I realized that once in my life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations.”

The philosopher’s “product line” were his opinions and ideas and he had reasoned that he needed to scrap them all and start afresh. He’d reached a point where the old ideas were no longer valid, so he . . .

. . . freed my mind of all cares, secluded myself for a period of leisurely tranquility, and [withdrew] into solitude.”

Descartes went on a strategic planning retreat. During his “period of tranquility” he set about to . . .

. . . attack straightaway those principals which supported everything I once believed.”

No cows were sacred. No assumptions given a Free Pass. He destroyed the past to make room for the future. His objective was to find one thing of which he could be absolutely certain and to use that as a foundation for building a new set of opinions.

Bringing It Home

Lest you determine that I have finally stepped off the curb, here are the lessons I think we can learn from Descartes:

1. Take nothing for granted. Allow no sacred cows, put everything on the table. This doesn’t mean you are going to scrap everything, but unless the review includes everything it isn’t worth doing.
2. Take your time. Reading through the Meditations you get a sense that Descartes was very thorough in his process of thinking through each conclusion and its subsequent result.
3. Seek outside counsel. Before publishing his work, Descartes asked people he respected to challenge his new assumptions. Your first step could be a Strategy Audit.
4. Give this a high priority. He cleared his calendar and his mind before secluding himself in a planning retreat. It is impossible to to question the status quo when you are sitting in the middle of it.

Similar to Descartes, your objective is to find the one thing that you do better than anyone else, your reason for existing. For Rene, the one thing of which he could be certain was that he thought. What’s yours?

Jim Seybert

Thank you so much for spending time with Counter Intelligence each month. You can be absolutely certain that I appreciate the time you invest in reading my stuff.

If you’d like to chat about this or anything else, pop me an email and we’ll set something up.