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Adding canonical book references for the 4 quadrants in response to a question. If you can't afford to hire people, read these books.
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Outer doubt: Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, Discworld, Discordianism Outer confidence: Getting Things Done, Inner Game of Tennis Inner doubt: Finite and infinite games Inner confidence: Impro, War of Art (these are generic; there are domain specific-ones in each too) twitter.com/rrherr/status/…
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Lol, one reason my market is so small is that people who rely on hitchhiker's guide type material for help with life/career/management/leadership problems are unlikely to make it to high levels in orgs or be entrepreneurs. Fortunately enough make it through to provide me a living
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Hmm... I think the US has generally lost confidence in itself, so long-term I may need to think about moving to a country that has more confidence in itself if this recession in the systematic doubt market continues much longer 🤔
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Another addendum: note that this is all agnostic to functional domain (marketing, org behavior, product dev, leadership, risk mgmt etc etc) and industry. Having competence a reasonable coverage zone along those 2 dimensions is table stakes.
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Obv. some (function, industry) pairs produce more problems in some quadrants than in others, so you should pick industry+functional areas to build knowledge and experience in that match your fundamental offering strength.
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Okay, this comment from made me realize there's a very good test of whether you're naturally better at boosting systematic confidence or boosting systematic doubt. The diagnostic question is: are you a connector or separator?
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Replying to @vgr
this 2x2 is the foundation of Integral theory (and DISC theory) and also I've seen it expressed as serotonin/dopamine, also forest/trees or global/analytical. Also rumsfeldian (unknown unknowns). Which means there's prior art for how you can profile and segment a good lead.
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Connectors see similarities/rhymes among mental models and use the basic reasoning pattern "A is pretty much the same as B therefore just choose the frame convenient for you". You build confidence by hedgehoggy unification. If you can unify 2 things but use only 1, 2x confidence
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Separators try to separate similar things by poking at what makes them different. This increases doubt, through disunification. What you are confident of understanding/doing gets put in a smaller box, and the net unknown in your world goes up.
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I have a strong separator bias, to the point of pedantry when I get really interested, and often go nuts making up elaborate 2x2 separation schemes to distinguish things. Long-time clients kinda indulge me a bit even when it isn't useful to them because they know I enjoy it.
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Replying to and
Another dimension is people who actually want a benefit/change from consulting and people who want to pretend there is a change from consulting business really just let us keeping going as we were.
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