Author(s): Matt Watkinson, Csaba Konkoly

Business and Investment

Since it became a discipline, business management has clung to a mechanistic mindset - a business is presumed to be like a machine, so analysing and optimising every individual facet of the enterprise is the path to greater success. And yet, this domain-level, mechanistic thinking has serious limitations. The best pricing guru in the world won't help if the product is a dud. A marketing genius won't fix poor cost control. At best your improvements will be minor and linear.

As Konkoly and Watkinson show, there is only one viable solution- to move from a mechanistic mindset to a probabilistic one. Instead of seeking solely to tame chance in our decision-making, we should seek to exploit it too. Instead of seeing random events as wrinkles to be smoothed, we should see them as opportunities to be explored.

A probabilistic mindset can supercharge our specialist, domain-level skills, add nuance to our systems thinking and dramatically improve our chances of success. But how exactly do we develop this mindset? What pragmatic steps must we take? How should our behaviour tomorrow be different from today? This book will be your guide.