The (really) controversial one
Does diagnosis hurt more than help?
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting speeches and assignments for 2026
THE 2026 KEYNOTE DECKS
When the ground moves. How to survive and thrive in a world of dynamic uncertainty. (Based on a new book by the same name.)
What to do when you don’t know what to do. How to create a competitive advantage from change. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
From last to first. How to create peak performance in the world’s most competitive settings. (On adaptive strategy in Formula 1.)
The volcano that birthed Frankenstein. How contexts enable innovation — and how to take make the most of it. (A narrative-based talk on global interconnectedness and enabling constraints.)
THE 2026 SERVICE OFFERING
Strategic guidance. Formulation, audits, the ABCDE framework, fractional CSO, knowledge workshops.
Uncertainty management. Dynamic uncertainty, executive decision-making, knowledge workshops.
Marketing guidance. Strategy, fractional CMO, knowledge workshops.
Teaching. Onsite lectures, offsites, knowledge workshops.
For any and all project inquiries, including presentations, merely send me an email by clicking this text.
The TL;DR
One of the most common issues in strategy, and arguably also in life, is an unwillingness to consider multiple perspectives.
For instance, many strategists’ favorite move, diagnosis, is often structurally unfit for complex systems and can manufacture false clarity and overconfidence. Few entertain the thought.
However, compressing messy symptom-patterns into neat labels discards potentially critical nuance, then multiplies the error.
To make matters worse, homogeneous training, tools, and incentives synchronize firms around the same story even though it may be objectively false.
In dynamic uncertainty, strategy works better as a portfolio of safe-to-fail actions with relentless measurement and rapid updating; diagnosis works better as a pattern-establishing tool.
Personal updates before we go-go
What a week. The youngest came down with a stomach bug the night between Saturday and Sunday. At first it came up; a couple of days later, it came down. And a lot of it. E-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.
Then, once the bug had eventually cleared her system, she developed a case of insomnia. That is to say, she would fall asleep alright, but then wake up three hours later and simply refuse to go back to sleep. Given that we were all (save for the eldest child) sleep-deprived already, it did not exactly lighten the mood.
Kids, man. They get you right in the feels. And sometimes in the gonads.
Greatly enjoy watching the Winter Olympics. It is obviously impossible not to be impressed by Frida Karlsson especially, but mind-boggling performances can be seen everywhere. Such a great TV event.
Given that I do not know that much about wine, this could be like saying “Vanilla Ice is a great hiphop artist”. But I do like pretty much everything that bears André Brunel’s name. The Châteauneuf-du-Pape Les Cailloux in particular is outstanding. To my palette anyway.
Moving on to markets.