let us be led by our thoughts
...and their hearts and minds will follow
One of the things I said I’d do in that manifesto is “take jokes and cliches seriously and literally”, as a tool of analysis. This is a useful technique, particularly in the business world. It’s useful because most dumb business jargon that’s quoted by airheads and clowns, started off as a good idea from someone clever who invented a pithy phrase to accurately describe it. Then it became trendy, then overused, then ridiculous.
So, “thought leadership”.
A phrase with the generally accepted meaning “some crap on LinkedIn”. But let’s apply the technique.
In conversation with a friend, I was reminded of a document I saw published in 2018 ahead of the UK elections by a law firm, going over (a frankly quite tendentious version of) the legal requirements for investor compensation in nationalised industries. If you switch off the part of your brain that spots silly and cliched phrases, a sentence like “We are telling a political party what they are allowed to do, in order to provide them with thought leadership” sounds quite sinister, does it not?
As some readers might know, part of my day job is to understand and to some extent predict the direction of financial regulation. I’ve got no trade secrets about how I do this; I regularly explain to my clients that the way to see which way regulators are heading is to read their speeches and to read the output of their research departments. If you do this consistently every week, you build up a mental picture of the “stylised facts” about how they see the world.
That will tell you what problems they think they need to solve and what their priorities are, and once you have that picture, it’s usually quite easy to guess what they’re going to do. The nature of the stylised facts themselves usually suggest the solution.
Stylised facts are important things. They’re like facts, but there are fewer of them. And that’s why they exist; they are the mental model, the way in which someone in an important decision making role “gets a drink from the firehose”, to use another cliché. The creation of stylised facts reduces the wild chaos and complexity of life to a representation someone can make sense of. Literally, they are the way in which the unmanageable is rendered manageable.
There’s no way to do without them, in any system that’s more complicated than a small coffee shop (and probably even in a coffee shop there are some hanging around). All you can do, yourself, is try to make sure that you regularly check your own stylised facts, to make sure they haven’t drifted out of touch with reality in a way that might cost you.
One might think that there was also considerable advantage to be gained by checking up other people’s stylised facts. It might be reasonable to suppose that you can get even more predictive ability by knowing when a set of stylised facts are out of touch with reality, and betting that they will adjust over time.
In my experience, this doesn’t work. Stylised facts do not necessarily bend in the direction of reality in any fast or systematic way. It’s easy to see why. The whole point of having a set of stylised facts to work on is to save yourself the mental effort of dealing with the underlying complexity. Having made the decision to attenuate your information in order to deal with it, you don’t then go back and unattenuate it.
Stylised facts seem to change, when they change, for three reasons. First, a catastrophe of some sort – a Damned Thing that can’t be fit into the framework. Second, pure chance – somebody happens to check an assumption, finds it was wrong and manages to convince their boss. And finally and most commonly, they change because the obvious solution was implemented and the problem is still there.
Obviously, this last one is a bit too late for people who are affected by the implementation of the bad policy. And if this argument about stylised facts is right, it means that most of the time, if a stylised fact gets entrenched, then it’s going to lead to a particular and predictable policy outcome and nobody will be able to easily stop it.
For this reason, it’s good to be able to create stylised facts ahead of time, before the point at which people have started a process of policy formulation. Thought leadership is the creation of stylised facts.
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(finally a short programming note. When I set this thing up, I thought that if you didn’t turn the payment options on it would just be like a blog. Then I started getting all these emails about “pledges” and frankly panicked. I have now calmed down and realised that the total amount of money pledged but not yet collected by me is roughly “a sum that it would be kind of stupid to just leave lying there”. If you got confused by the substack user interface and pledged money you didn’t intend to, you have about three days (roughly the time it will take me to work out how) to reverse and cancel.
(at present I have no plans for subscriber-only content, but the fact of having accepted money for this mail will definitely mean I feel I have to keep consistently writing it; it also makes it a lot easier to justify spending the time to myself. It’s entirely possible that after a few months I’ll feel guilty, or have something I want to be slightly protected from the whole internet, and sub-only posts will start showing up, but that’s not a guarantee by any means. And of course I’m really grateful to everyone who paid, and surprisingly touched by some of the nice comments you wrote)