How to Think like a Strategic Genius
How to think like a strategic genius (a study of 82,000 cases confirms it). Álvaro García | Mental Garden 9/15/26
Note to Readers: To improve or solve a social problem the Social Entrepreneur needs to develop a strategy.
Below are helpful suggestions for thinking though developing a strategy.
Tip: Module 8 of the Practitioner Guide has additional information on developing a strategy.
N.B. Article has been edited for length.
“I want to show you a model with decades of evidence behind it. Built to predict who thinks well and who only believes they think well (and is at risk).
Two ways of thinking.
Hedgehog: knows 1 big thing. Has a central, coherent, and powerful theory, and applies it to everything that crosses their path. When reality doesn’t fit their theory, the problem is reality, not the theory.
Fox: knows many small things. Doesn’t have 1 great unifying theory, has dozens of partial models, combines them, weighs them according to context, and is willing to discard any one of them as soon as it stops being useful.
Over 20 years, psychologist Philip Tetlock took more than 82,000 predictions from 284 experts (economists, political scientists, journalists, diplomats, and more) about politics, economics, and international conflicts. Then he waited to see what happened in reality (Tetlock, 2005). The result is ridiculous.
The hedgehogs predicted worse than the foxes.
The soldier and the scout
The answer isn’t in how much you know.
Collecting diplomas increases your potential, but all that knowledge will be wasted mercilessly if the quality of your thinking is mediocre.
Psychologist Ziva Kunda (1990) found that the key was in what you defend.
She called this motivated reasoning. We process information differently depending on whether the conclusion threatens us or benefits us. When a piece of data supports what we already believed, we accept it without question. When it contradicts it, suddenly we become rigorous skeptics, demanding double proof and searching for any crack in the theory to discard it.
This self-destructive attitude is caused by confirmation bias.
Researcher Julia Galef (2021) gave this phenomenon an image: the difference between the soldier mindset and the scout mindset.
The soldier: processes information as if it were a war. Every new piece of data is either an attack to defend against or ammunition to recruit for their side. Their goal is not to be caught out and to defend their theory whether or not it’s true.
The scout: processes information like a map they want accurate, even if the real terrain turns out less favorable than expected. Their goal is not to crash into reality, so they adjust their theory at every step.
The 4 dimensions of problems
Consultant Dave Snowden, together with Mary Boone, developed a model that’s useful for understanding what terrain we’re playing on when facing a new issue (Snowden & Boone, 2007).
There are 4 types of problems.
Simple: the cause-effect relationship is obvious and stable over time. Here, best practices, checklists, and fixed processes work.
Complicated: the cause-effect relationship exists, but it requires experience to see it. Here, experts and rigorous analysis work. This is where the hedgehog can still survive without being cruelly crushed by reality.
Complex: the cause-effect relationship is only understood in hindsight, after having acted. Here, neither best practice nor the expert works. You need to experiment on a small scale, observe the result, and adjust. The fox’s instinct is indispensable to survive here.
Chaotic: there is no identifiable cause-effect relationship in the moment. Here, there’s no time to think slowly. You need to act first to stabilize the situation and think afterward. This is where the situation turns many untrained people into hedgehogs, no matter how strategically brilliant they were.
How to elevate your thinking Tetlock, who as you now know demonstrated that fox and hedgehog thinking was real, came back with another question: if you take ordinary people, without access to high-value information, and teach them to think like foxes, do they actually improve?
The project was called the Good Judgment Project. The result was that a group systematically outperformed professional analysts with access to privileged information on a subject. The key was the calibrated feedback loop. That is, writing down a prediction with a percentage of confidence, waiting for the result, measuring the error, and adjusting the next forecast accordingly. It’s the same structure that psychologist Anders Ericsson (1993) described for mastering any skill at the highest level. It takes a course correction based on a measurable result, over and over again. Here is the guided process to elevate the quality of your thinking.”
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