Almost everyone that has attended one of my workshops will have been forced to do the ‘save the Titanic’ exercise. The main point of the exercise is to demonstrate that, given the right instructions, people with zero domain knowledge can, in five minutes, generate plausible solutions that would have meant, at the very least, everyone on board the ill-fated ship would have survived.

One of the new difficulties when running this kind of exercise is that, in what feels like an attempt to prove my hypothesis that humans will do literally anything to avoid having to think, some delegates will make a sneaky Google search. More recently still, some have gone a step further and asked Chat-GPT.

Fortunately for me, the answers that these people will find are terrible. Utterly useless. The results from Chat-GPT are worse than useless. In that if someone on an actual sinking ship followed the advice it offers they would almost inevitably die.

Here’s what the AGI non-oracle had to say:

And then a follow-up attempt to try and tap into the best of the internet’s creativity:

So much for the wisdom of the crowd. Or algorithm designer.

In fairness to the algorithm that purportedly scoured the best advice from the internet to formulate its response, the first answer would be sensible. Obvious but sensible. Common sense. All the other answers perhaps also sound sensible. Sometimes ‘sensible’ is the right way to go, and sometimes it isn’t. The sinking of the Titanic was one of the situations where sensible would have killed.

What was required instead was someone with the ability to first of all define the actual problem to be solved in a more effective manner. And then second, to look for ‘counter-intuitive’ solutions. That’s what the workshop exercise is all about. When the rules don’t apply anymore, the job is to go find better rules. Rules that by definition aren’t going to be found among the crowd. Or at least not in the form we expect them to be. In addition to my Titanic exercise torture, my workshop delegates will also hear me say, ‘someone somewhere already solved your problem’ about a million times. Someone somewhere will have solved your sinking ship problem. Just not people that were on sinking ships. Finding the right ‘someone’ is what TRIZ and the Systematic Innovation methodology have been about for the last eighty years. One day, perhaps, that domain-shifting horizontal knowledge will find its way into the AGI world. Until then were stuck with thinking. Or rather thinking better. Uncommon sense maybe?

In the quest for weight loss, individuals often endure intense diets, stomach-shrinking procedures, or invest in pricey medications like Ozempic. However, a recent breakthrough, detailed in Science Advances, introduces a gentler and potentially more affordable solution: a vibrating pill designed to activate stomach nerve endings, signaling the brain to halt eating.

Reported as a promising obesity treatment for humans, this innovative capsule significantly reduces food intake in pigs without apparent side effects. Described as a “credible and ingenious approach” by neurobiologist Guillaume de Lartigue, the concept leverages the stomach’s stretching mechanism, which triggers nerve signals informing the brain of fullness.

Conventional obesity treatments, such as fluid-filled stomach balloons or implanted nerve-stimulating devices, have limitations and potential risks. The newly proposed solution, a 31-by-10-millimeter pill with a tiny motor and battery, activates when exposed to stomach fluid. The resulting vibrations, lasting approximately 38 minutes, aim to stimulate stretch-sensing nerve endings, inducing a feeling of satiety.

While the approach is applauded for its creativity and convincing data, some experts question its practicality as a weight loss therapy. Nonetheless, researchers led by Harvard’s Shriya Srinivasan and MIT’s Giovanni Traverso anticipate further development, potentially offering a safer and more accessible solution for combating obesity. All of these ‘practicality’ problems are merely the next conflicts needing to be solved. The most important one is the first one, the one delivering the principal inventive step. This is the one solving the first contradiction: we want to reduce the amount of food that people consume, but the empty volume of our stomach sends a message to our brain that we need to eat. Here’s what that problem looks like when mapped onto the Contradiction Matrix:

I’m still slightly amazed that Principle 18, Vibration, is one of the top recommendations. Having now received that insight, solving the problem of the pill-size (10mm!), durability, removal/disposal safety, cost and no doubt other currently-less-than-ideal attributes is merely about mapping and then solving the new contradictions. Or maybe short-cutting them all and creating a Principle 18 solution that is external and therefore doesn’t need to be ingested at all. Just a thought.

Do humans possess free-will or not? Innovation-wise, we know, of course, that any question containing the word ‘or’ I automatically the wrong question, but nevertheless the question hasn’t stopped the philosophers of the world from going around in ever decreasing circles for the last couple of centuries. According to them ‘the’ answer depends on one’s philosophical, religious, or scientific beliefs. Here are a few perspectives:

Compatibilism: Some philosophers argue for a compatibilist perspective, suggesting that free will can coexist with determinism. In this view, even if the universe operates under deterministic principles, individuals can still have meaningful choices and control over their actions within the constraints of those deterministic forces.

Determinism: Others adhere to a deterministic view, asserting that every event, including human actions, is predetermined by prior causes. From this standpoint, free will is an illusion, as choices are ultimately the result of preceding factors. This standpoint singularly fails, however, to recognise that in any complex system any links between cause and effect are tenuous at best, and non-existent in a majority of cases.

Libertarianism: Libertarianism, in the philosophical sense, not to be confused with the political ideology, argues for a form of free will that is incompatible with determinism. It posits that individuals have the ability to make choices that are not wholly determined by external factors.

Neuroscience and Science: From a scientific standpoint, some argue that advances in neuroscience challenge the notion of free will. Brain processes and neural activity could be seen as determining factors in decision-making, suggesting that choices are, to some extent, a product of physical processes in the brain.

Existentialism: Existentialist philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre, embraced a radical form of free will. They argued that individuals are condemned to be free, meaning that we are responsible for our choices even in the absence of external determinants.

And then along comes WEF sock-puppet, Yuval Noah Harari, with the ‘thought’ that the ‘era of free will is over’. Thanks for that insight. Which, if I try and look at the statement without laughing is perhaps a piece of wishful neo-Marxist presuasion thinking. I don’t know. And I care less. Because, back to the original ‘to be or not to be’ question, the only meaningful answer is that the world needs both sides of the contradiction. Something like this:

What this bubble map in effect is trying to say is that we are all of us capable of exhibiting ‘free-will’. Watching my football team at the start of this season felt like a really good example of eleven players expressing their free-will by explicitly not doing what the, admittedly lost, manager told them to do. In a related vein, I could make a choice to swim across the Bristol Channel dressed in a doughnut-suit and singing The Beatles greatest hits in Danish. I’m pretty certain I’d be the first person in the world to think of this idea. The problem now is that I, like the Bradford City First XI, will quickly discover what most people instinctively understand: that most acts of free-will create outcomes that are worse than those that would have been achieved if we’d merely followed the well-established, ‘pre-determined’ success paths of those that had been there before us.

This is merely another way of paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy: every happy result of free-will is the same, each unhappy result of free-will is unsuccessful in its own way.

Free-will is what allows a person to break the established rules. The vast majority of broken rules – playing a 3-3-1-2-1 formation for example – deliver worse outcomes, but a tiny few end up giving the world the innovation it so desperately needs right now.

No free-will, no innovation.

Which I realise is what makes the removal of free-will so attractive to the WEF, perhaps the most un-inspiring, un-creative, un-impressive group of individuals ever to walk the Earth.

(Unless, of course, the whole thing is a massive double-bluff, and Klaus Schwab recognises that mankind will only solve its current problems if we can unite everyone against a common enemy. And that the only thing everyone on the planet can agree on right now is that we don’t want WEF looking after the future. In which case, I bow to their genius.)

Like it or not, the World throws Ordeals at us from time to time, and like it or not again, if we’re going to successfully complete the Hero’s Journeys necessary to overcome those Ordeals, it will be thanks to the blood-and-guts, rule-breaking, unchained free-will of the Hero.

A question from a prospective new client prompted me to remember the time I was at a music conference. I think it was 2017 and one of the authors of the newly minted Leeds Culture Strategy was extolling the virtues of creating an ‘innovation-friendly’ environment. I like innovation and therefore I like the idea of innovation-friendly. Then the speaker mentioned that they were using Austin, Texas as the model for what innovation-friendly meant. At the end of the presentation, I asked what musical innovation had emerged from Austin in the last ten years. The speaker looked at me as if I was from another planet (Bradford). The best he could come up with was the SXSW festival, but essentially, there was no sensible answer to my question. The reason being that what’s happened in Austin is what happens when most organisations decide they want to nurture an ‘innovation culture’ inside their business. Or city. They make the mistake of making life easy for people. SXSW is a great festival – one of the best nights of my life was talking to one of the organisers on an overnight flight back to London – but it has nothing at all to do with innovation. Rather, it is a place for self-congratulatory industry big-wigs to drink champagne while watching a bunch of pre-selected, up-and-coming, fit-the-formula bands and musicians perform for them. This is the Austin version of building an ‘Innovation Lab’. The sort filled with bean-bags, chocolate fountains, motivational posters, Gantt charts and high tech digital voting pads for times when the senior management team turn up for a handkerchief-waving state visit.

To the best of my knowledge, with respect to my Texan friends, nothing musically innovative has emerged from Austin ever. And certainly not since SXSW or Austin City Limits arrived on the scene. I hear the their offended shouts of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Definitely innovative, and definitely connected to Austin, but the innovation happened way before Austin became his adopted city. The innovation happened, I propose, after his birth in Dallas during the early years when his family moved around the South (Arkansas Louisiana Oklahoma and Mississippi) as his asbestos-worker father rattled from one crappy, poorly-paying job to the next.

Let’s not go too far down the rabbit hole. The point is that looking to create an innovation friendly environment by modelling yourself after an environment that is demonstrably the precise opposite is probably not going to go well.

In their heart of hearts, I think the L**ds Culture Strategy guru knew this. I think he knew that, if you look at all the places where musical innovation has actually happened, the only common factor is that they have always been shit-holes. The left-hand photo at the head of this post is the interior of CBGBs in the New York Bowery district. In the mid-1970s it was a piss-stained, vomit-soaked broken-bottle rat-hole dive, constantly half a step away being condemned. But it was also the crucible that spawned generation-defining artists like Patti Smith, Television, The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie. CBGBs was by all accounts of the time a health hazard. 1970s New York wasn’t much better. It was the time of near-bankruptcy, crime through the roof, garbage in the streets, drugs, prostitution and no way out. Only an idiot would chose to live there. Enter the poor idiots. The starving artists that couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. The people willing to live in derelict squats to pursue their art. Creative under-resourced people living amongst other creative, under-resourced people. A literal crucible for innovation.

At this point, we might feel some sympathy for the L**ds Culture Strategy guru. No-one in their right mind is going to go to the Local Government to ask them to turn the city into a shit-hole in order to help create an actual innovation friendly environment. For a start, if that’s what you ask for, you’re not going to be given large wads of cash to help make it happen. No possibility there for fully expensed fact-finding visits to Austin. Or music innovation conferences for that matter. No budget for converting old industrial buildings and filling them with bean-bags and chocolate fountains. Nothing pretty for the suits to come and admire.

Strangely enough, the Leeds music scene hasn’t produced anything innovative since 2017. Except maybe the Brudenell Social Club, which, loathed as I am to complement anything associated with L**ds, has become one of the best music venues in the country. Funnily enough, it is located in one of the worst parts of the city, and has stayed completely separate from the Culture Strategy. Brudenell kind of gets it.

I’m provoked to mention this subject at all, because now we’re all expected to go back to the office following the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re starting to get enquiries – like the one that provoked my memory of L**ds and Austin – usually from HR people, asking for advice on how to design and create innovation-friendly labs. I haven’t quite resorted to showing them photos of the inside of CBGBs, but I’m getting close. A deliberately created shit-hole is probably going to be as ineffective as the previously mentioned bean-bag filled labs. Or some of the other things you’ll find in the depressingly tragic cookie-cutter winners of the ‘Best Innovation Labs’ 2023 award winners exhibited at https://gfmag.com/features/best-innovation-labs-2023/. The only guarantee with all of them is they will produce zero innovation. Definitive unnovation.

The real job is to define and manage another of our Goldilocks Curves:

Innovation doesn’t happen by smoothing the road for the team. It happens best when things are made just hard enough that it provokes the optimum amount of grit, persistence and rule-breaking bloody-mindedness. Successful innovation labs don’t get called ‘Skunkworks’ or ‘Pirate’s Cove’ or ‘Cockroach Corner’ for nothing. Make life the right amount of difficult and then keep (Red World) management the fuck away and leave the skunks, pirates and cockroaches to get on with doing what they do best.

“The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organisation to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”
Angela Duckworth

Imagine you’ve got this fantastic contraption in the heart of a Persian desert dwelling—a “badgir,” (بادگیر) they call it. A 700-year-old air conditioner capable of cooling an environment up to 12°C with no power input. Picture a slender tower, made from mud brick or whatever materials the desert provides. Now, at the summit of this tower, there’s this ingenious setup: openings, like welcoming portals, facing the insistent desert winds. Then there are a series of vertical vanes, like nature’s own air conductors.

When those winds come sweeping in, they’re directed downward into the depths of the structure. But here’s the beauty of it—a concealed channel, a kind of architectural rabbit hole, guides this wind into the living spaces below. As this invisible breeze infiltrates the dwelling, it works a magic trick: it pushes the warm air out, creating a sort of natural air exchange.

In the dance between wind and channel, the interior gets a breath of fresh, cool air, and the oppressive warmth is cast away into the open. It’s a play of pressures and flows, a symphony of desert design that, prior to a recent sustainability-resurgence architects seemingly forgot. The desert’s answer to cooling, not with high-tech gadgetry, but with the elegance of a structure attuned to the rhythms of completely natural resources.

Here’s what the badgir temperature regulation versus power conflict looks like when mapped onto the Contradiction Matrix:

All in all, it looks pretty much like the architects of 700 years ago could’ve written their own version of the Matrix: Principle 25, Self-Service, tick. Principle 31, Holes, tick. Principle 2, Taking-Out/Separation (upwind/downwind sides of the tower), tick. Principle 17, Another Dimension (going underground, Qanat), tick. Principle 3, Local Quality (different rooms), tick:

Entrepreneur chef, Davide Cerretini’s business strategy is one that most restaurant owners probably wouldn’t endorse: trying to become Yelp’s lowest-rated restaurant in the San Francisco area.

“I really don’t want to be in the Yelp listing,” Cerretini has said, “so we decided if you can’t beat them, try to play the same game. If I can’t be removed from that list, I’m going to do everything in my power to be the most unreliable restaurant ever.”

Cerretini started offering incentives to customers to post one-star reviews on Yelp of his restaurant, Botto Bistro in Richmond, California. Anyone who posts an on-site poor review of the restaurant receives an immediate 25 percent off their bill.

Reviews range from sarcastic (“I might as well have been in Italy. YUCK!”) to supportive (“I can only give this place one star. To do so otherwise would show them disrespect. The pizza is fabulous and I want to support any business that’s willing to expose Yelp’s unhelpful review manipulation policies.”), but they all come with a one-star rating.

“Knowing we’re confident in our food, we decided, ‘Let’s go the other way. Let’s make fun of ourselves,” Cerretini explained.

Cerretini decided to start the rewards program in response to what he sees as Yelp’s manipulation of reviews and unfair practices to “blackmail” restaurants into advertising on the site.

“We did advertising, we tried to play the game, we tried to do what every other restaurant has to do to the point where finally one day we decided the harassment was enough. No more phone calls for advertising; no more worrying about the review,” he said. And there began the ‘25% off for a bad review’ idea.

From a Contradiction Matrix perspective, Cerretini’s problem looks like this:

And his solution presents us with a inspiringly brave illustration of Inventive Principle 13, The Other Way Around.

The result? A ten-fold increase in business. Then Yelp complained. So Cerretini got himself an interview on Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to announce his new offer. 50% off the price of your meal for a bad review.

He now also offers blockbuster-success ‘One Star’ Italian cooking courses. Not sure if that counts as an example of Principle 5 or 7?

Here more about Cerretini’s inspiring little-guy-fights-back story at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001rym0.

I had the great privilege of presenting a plenary address at the once-every-four-years, World Engineers Convention last month in Prague. The Seventh one. The theme this time around was the 17 UNESCO Strategic Development Goals. The opening address included a specially recorded video message from (gulp) the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. I hadn’t realised the event was so prestigious. That aside, the thrust of Guterres’ message seemed to be that UNESCO was failing on all seventeen of the Goals, that things were getting worse rather than better, and, please, engineers of the world, could you try a little bit harder.

It couldn’t have made for a better lead in to my plenary later in the day. The thrust of which was how the Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity pointed towards the likelihood that the Law of Unintended Consequences was likely to kick in and conspire to ensure that all seventeen of the Strategic Development goals would not be met. Good intentions is not enough. Good intentions – of which there was probably a hundred nation’s worth of amongst the conference attendees – plus inadequate knowledge always serve to deliver the precise opposite of the intended outcomes.

The heart of the problem is this. Forgive me if I’m starting to sound like a broken record. The reason the Law Of Unintended Consequences comes into play is because when people focus on the achievement of multiple targets they almost always ignore the inevitable relationships between those targets. Take any of the individual targets and sooner or later, it will conflict with with any – and eventually ‘all’ of the others.

If there are different teams working to achieve each of the individual goals, they never see these conflicts. All they get to see is the frustration when all of their hard work results in going backwards.

In theory, it is only the leaders responsible for coordinating the collective work that get to see the ‘between’ part of the story. Except, in nearly every case, they’ve never been told to look at it. And, even if they had, and then began to see the conflicts, they have no idea what to do with them. Other than compromise, of course, which is where the rot sets in.

I suspect UNESCO is too far down the slippery trade-off slope to be able to salvage any positive outcomes from the SDGs. The simple choice right now, seems to be to either decide which sixteen are going to be sacrificed in order to have a chance of succeeding with one. Or to start teaching people how to look for and solve contradictions. Starting, most likely with Antonio Guterres. Who might then learn that the worst thing he could possibly tell people to do in the future would be ‘work harder’. Please, don’t work harder. Teach people how to work smarter. Teach them that good intentions are toxic if they aren’t complemented by sufficient cross-disciplinary wisdom. It’s not rocket science. Just not accepting trade-offs.

The World Engineer’s Convention was a great social event. Especially the eye-popping 120Euro per head President’s Dinner. As is usually the case when people haven’t met up for four years, there’s lots to catch up on. Alas, when a thousand delegates are in ‘transmit’ mode rather than ‘receive’, things rapidly descend into noise. Signal gets lost. Which, I guess, is my way of saying I don’t think I’ll be heading to the Eighth World Engineer’s Convention in four years time. Unless someone manages to get the UN Secretary General to attend one of our workshops next year. Or maybe, at a pinch, the WEC President.

One of the no-doubt apochryphal TRIZ stories concerned the consultant brought in to solve the problem of elevators for high-rise buildings. Lifting people fifty storeys into the air was slow. Passengers hated the thought of long elevator rides several times a day. The elevator company was trying to design faster solutions. They weren’t working, and they were expensive. Millions of dollars worth of expensive. The consultant offered a solution that would cost a couple of hundred dollars. A solution that is still in use today. The solution involved putting mirrors inside the elevator car. People, he realised, didn’t care how slow elevators were, they cared about losing their precious time. Once the mirrors were in place, we’re able to check we don’t have cabbage in our teeth, haven’t spilled soup over our shirt and practice our empathic smile skills. Simple.

Not that there’s a direct corollary I’m sure, but it feels to me that the huge national embarrassment, HS2, the proposed new high-speed rail link from London to what now looks like North London rather than Manchester and Leeds, a link promising to save people twenty minutes, would do well to think about the twenty-first century version of fitting mirrors rather than destroying several thousand acres of green-belt land. And spending what now looks like five times the originally estimated cost. Which is ultimately most likely the point: politicians like big, sexy projects. They like their names on plaques.

Mirrors and plaques aside, HS2 is now also the talk of anyone interested in project management around the world. As a prime example of how NOT to do projects. Whatever HS2 managers are doing, the logic now goes, good project management means do the opposite.

Here’s an example. The current (nobody believes anyway) estimate for the project is around £207B. Or, mile for mile, over ten times what it would have cost in Germany, and almost twenty times what it would have cost to build in China.

As is the norm these days, all the work is competitively tendered. Which in turn means that prospective contractors put in unrealistically low bids, knowing that if they put in realistic ones, they won’t get the job. They then ‘solve’ the job under-estimate problem by writing into their bids a series of Get Out Of Jail Free cards that, as soon as anything in the specification changes, opens up the opportunity to renegotiate the contract value. Only this time without the annoying competitive tender process. In summary, the result is a working environment that might best be described as ‘low-trust’.

Enter TRIZ again to say that HS2 is not the first time in the world there has been a conflict between a contractor’s desire to minimise production costs and having to contract to a low-trust market. Here’s what the Business Matrix has to say about how the problem has been successfully addressed by others in similar situations:

Seeing one of my favourite Principles at the top of the recommendations list triggered a search that picked up this recent letter from The Times, from the CEO of the rather more successfully managed HS1 project. Here’s what he had to say:

I don’t think he knows Inventive Principle 9, Prior Counter-Action explicitly, but the way he managed contractors during HS1 offers up a nigh on perfect illustration of the Principle anyway.

The HS2 CEO clearly didn’t know or understand Principle 9 either. Here’s hoping the CEO of HS3 (sometime in the 23^rd Century most likely) remembers again. Probably aided by a Business Matrix equipped digital twin. That way we don’t miss a generation again. Just a thought.

My quest for example of the Correct/True matrix continues. Zen Buddhism seems to contain a rich seam of examples. Albeit there doesn’t always appear to be a great deal of consensus among the community about what any of them actually mean. Maybe that’s the point?

Anyway, here’s one of my favourites:

One day, a novice was told that important guests were expected. Immediately, he set about tending the garden. He removed weeds, pruned tree branches and shrubs. He even brushed the moss. Since it was autumn, the ground was untidy with dry leaves. The novice raked the leaves with great zeal and then painstakingly scooped them all into bags.

All this while, the old master was watching him from across the wall. The novice finished with his labour of love. A look of satisfaction spread across his face. “Doesn’t it look beautiful now?” he said, turning to the master.

“Indeed it does,” replied the master, “but something’s not quite right. Here, give me a hand over this wall and I’ll fix it for you.”

Puzzled, the novice did as he was asked. The old master made his way slowly to a tree in the centre of the garden, gripped its trunk and shook it gently, releasing a small scattering of orange, russet and brown leaves onto the freshly tended ground. “There,” he said, “that’s better.” 

The novice in this parable thinks his job is to make the garden ‘tidy’. As in, the correct form of a perfectly tended garden should be mess-less. A garden full of fallen leaves is not correct. One that has had all those fallen leaves removed is. But its only when the master shakes the tree that we achieve a scene that is both correct and true. Something like this:

“When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.”
Idries Shah

I was reading The Book Of Five Rings the other day (don’t ask!). Purportedly a book relevant to business strategy, it is essentially the legacy of Miyamoto Musashi’s learnings as Japan’s ‘greatest swordsman’. I’m all for a good analogy, but I’d have to say that there are a lot of things Musashi san recommends, that feel like the precise opposite of good 21^st Century business practice. Anyway, taking the perspective that there’s good in everything, two things struck me about the Five Rings.

The first is that it was full of contradictions:

Picking up on these contradictions, rather than being a criticism of the book, I propose is actually its essence. The contradictions are in effect the good questions that force the reader to think.

A warrior should have a teacher and not have a teacher.

They need to understand the peaceful arts as well as the killing arts.

‘The end result of any study is a kind of death before the attainment of perfection.’

The need to devote all available time to being a warrior and also to be knowledgeable of other domains (‘to learn the sword, study the guitar’).

‘There is no purpose in trying to determine whether one is better than another. If anything is anything, then everything is everything.’

‘Do not confuse profit with profitability.’

Rules are rules, but some rules ‘can be changed to suit a particular need.’

Have complete confidence but also have contingency plans.

‘To know ten thousand things, know one thing well.’

The ‘spirit’ should be large and small.

‘The ultimate weapon is “thing-no-thing”.’

‘Timing and rhythm – they are one and the same thing, yet they are different’.

‘See that which cannot be seen.’

They must be alone and interact with society.

‘Learn to see things far away and close up.’

‘Remember, as you submit to the “spirit of the thing”, that the “spirit of the thing” will submit itself to you.’

‘The grip (on the sword) should be both loose and tight at the same time.’

‘An attack must be conducted with quickness, not speed.’

‘Attack with power not strength.’

‘The strategy of “attack-no-attack.”’

Be relentless and direct… but always have an escape route.

‘The warrior first understands being a warrior when he no longer concerns himself with being a warrior.’

‘Become the enemy.’

‘To suffocate a shadow.’

Shout to scare the enemy… but not too much.

All attacks should be direct… but look for and chip away at the weak spots.

‘Think of strategy as being a snake’s head and a snake’s tail.’

‘Attitude/no-attitude.’

Your sword should be long… but not too long

‘The spirit of the universe is an emptiness which is no-thing.’

‘In the universe, no-thing-ness is not a thing that is true and not a thing that is not true.’

‘Because all the universe is simply no-thing-ness, there is no reason to pursue any attempt at perfection. Perfection is all there is and when you come to realise this, you will have understood my Way.’

(Not that I’m a big fan of the bible, but I was struck by similarities with the research project identifying all the 400+ contradictions it contains (https://philb61.github.io/index.html). Scanning through the list, it looks like half of the ‘contradictions’ are more like discrepancies (like, how many sons did Absalom have), but the actual contradictions (‘is it okay to covet?’) are there, I think, to make readers think for themselves. Or at least that’s the strategy I would’ve used if I were writing a book designed to make readers think. Hmm.)

Meanwhile, biblical diversion over and back to the Book Of Five Rings, the second thing that struck me was a series of things that I thought were contradictions that Musashi’s warrior philosophy told me weren’t. They include:

There can be no difference between frivolous contests/training and a real fight-to-the-death battle – encounters are only meaningful if physical death is a reality.

There are no shortcuts.

‘All things can only be built from the ground up and in one stage at a time.’

Always have a sword in each hand.

‘Whether on or off the battlefield, there is no difference in spirit. The warrior sees all life as the battlefield.’

‘Always fight with your spine erect and unbent.’

‘Do not show your enemy false bravado.’

‘The only reason to draw your sword is to cut the enemy down.’

‘There is no difference between walking and running into battle or walking and running in everyday life.’

‘Do not be a “righty” or a “lefty”. Become both by practicing your movements from all directions.’

Use your enemy’s strength as your own.

‘Everything emanates from a central core. This is true of all things regardless of their appearance.’

‘An attack of any kind must originate from the centre of the warrior and go direct to the centre of the enemy.’

Always remain calm.

‘Always return your weapon along the same path it travelled out on.’

‘The sword is an extension of the body.’

‘Stick to the enemy like glue.’

‘In fighting it is always best to go straight in.’

‘Do not attempt to be clever with your feet.’

‘Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.’

Ultimately, both strategies – revealing contradictions that are and contradictions that aren’t – in Musashi’s philosophy are intended to achieve the same goal. And that is to force people to do what people normally avoid doing: think. And maybe that’s ends up providing the main connection between being a great warrior and a great business leader?