The Rise of Solutionists: Developing Counterfactual Reasoning Skills to Solve Complex Business Challenge

An MIT cognitive scientist Tobias Gerstenberg deployed a fascinating experiment.  Dr. Gerstenberg demonstrated a compelling mental model called Counterfactuals.  The study, conducted in 2017, is groundbreaking in the cognitive field.  The human mind makes very many micro-predictions when facing a situation/decision.  To prove this, Dr. Gerstenberg, decided to study the eye movements of people.  Eighteen videos were recorded, and the eye movements were tracked using infrared light.  The research found that people rapidly shifted their focus to imagine the possible trajectories of the call visually.  In other words, they applied Counterfactual reasoning to anticipate what might happen – so the eye is rapidly shifting between Reality and Imagined Reality.  The eye can predict what may happen – In this case, it acts as a forecasting tool!. 

Understanding this can enable all of us to become better predictors.  For a Recruiter, this skill is critical to nurture and grow as they can predict whether a candidate will join them or not. It is not just in micro contexts.  Using such counterfactual thinking will benefit long-term planning as well.  The earliest such mental models date back to Dr. William Crookes’ dire food scarcity warning

At the end of the 19^th century, William Crookes – physicist, chemist, and inventor of Crookes tube (an early vacuum tube), issued a dire warning.  The British Isles, he said, were at grave risk of running out of food.  His reasoning was simple, the population was growing, but the amount of land under cultivation could not keep pace.  Dr. Crookes delivered this at a dinner event, and many of his colleagues were very upset.  They called him an “Alarmist,”  But it is an alarm that triggered the development of Fertilizers to improve crop yields.  In some ways, this alarm kept the world fed (hunger is still prevalent, the recent Sri Lankan food crisis is an example.  But crop yields have improved significantly over the last century)

Two weeks ago, at a leadership meeting, I was asked, if I were to identify one new skill that Enterprises should develop, what would that be.  After researching, we produced a taxonomy of various skills across Digital, Tech, and Corporate Functions.  But one skill, we highlighted is becoming important