So let us begin the adventure of living with the chapter’s heuristic: “Destroy judgment, create curiosity.” The first step is to recognise the power of your own thoughts by exploring your inner terrain.

Entropy

It is not hard to see entropy at work… Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant’s business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.

In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer. Advice to do this is both often given and taken. Yet this advice skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: thinking about your own thinking.

The problem is that there might be better ideas out there, just beyond the edge of our vision. But we accept early closure because letting go of a judgment is painful and disconcerting. To search for a new insight, one would have to put aside the comfort of being oriented and once again cast around in choppy waters for a new source of stability. There is the fear of coming up empty-handed. Plus, it is unnatural, even painful, to question our own ideas.

You can choose how you will approach a problem; you can guide your own thinking about it.” I want them to see that this is the heart of the matter. This personal skill is more important than any one so-called strategy concept, tool, matrix, or analytical framework. It is the ability to think about your own thinking, to make judgments about your own judgments.