Spark 11 – How to think more strategically: Veil of Rationality: Insights

In reality, there is a veil clouding your judgement, concealing important factors like intuition, creativity and emotional intelligence, which are crucial in strategic thinking. Don’t misunderstand me: data and logic are important, but they aren’t the end-all-be- all. As Albert Einstein said, ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

In the Western world, rationalist and science-centric meta frameworks often favour and reward thinking and decisions that are based purely on logic and reason and, even better, are backed by logic. This veil of rationality is a real problem. I believe it’s one of the places where strategic thinking falls well short of realising its true potential.

Here’s the kicker: it takes a keen self-awareness to even recognise you’re operating under this veil. Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, we often don’t see the shadows for what they are — merely representations of a greater reality outside the cave. It’s essential to challenge our assumptions continuously and question whether our so-called ‘rational decisions’ are as impartial as they seem. It’s an introspective process, but an invaluable one.

The veil of rationality is not a nemesis to be vanquished, but a bias to be understood and balanced. Sometimes, letting a bit of ‘irrationality’ in might make your strategy not just good, but extraordinary. So, the next time you find yourself saying, ‘It’s just common sense,’ stop and think. Is it really? Or is it just the veil of rationality obscuring your vision? Lift it, and you might just find a whole new landscape of strategic possibilities.

How to think more strategically: an example

So how do we unlock new avenues for growth? Let me give you an example…

Back in the day there was a concept called ‘social return on investment’. The idea was to quantify, often in dollars, the value of the social return of a service or social activity for every dollar invested into it.

One dollar invested, eight dollars of social impact, and so forth. Projects developed massive spreadsheets to capture all the social impacts and all the proxies used to measure social impact in the pursuit of this magic, one in eight out. One of my public speaking gigs was to be the dissenting voice against SROI, the prime reason being the rubbery nature of the proxies we would develop for measuring social impact – there was the appearance of science, but no real science.

After much debate the advisory industry has moved to impact assessment – a practice that blends hard data (not proxies) where it can be found, lived experience and the views of executive to try to deliver a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the impact any given initiative is having.