Today is April 7 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “Are you a fox or a hedgehog?”
In his famous 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” British scholar Isaiah Berlin used the words of a Greek poet — “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — to distinguish between two fundamental ways of seeing the world.
Hedgehogs relate everything to a single organizing principle or truth, and foxes maintain a diffusive, even contradictory, outlook.
Two such examples of hedgehogs are employees who have deep experience in one narrow field or experts in a specific subject matter.
Foxes, however, have jumped from discipline to discipline in order to learn many things — yet followed no neat trajectory (and are unsure trajectories even exist).
Hedgehogs bring deep domain expertise, and the increasing complexity of our workplaces has placed an understandable premium on their concentrated mastery.
Conversely, the natural habitat of foxes is innovation, which depends on the ability to mix preexisting and often widely divergent elements into a new creative combination.
The research suggests that hedgehogs are common while foxes are a rare sight.
In a Boston Globe article, David Dabscheck states that “technology companies need more foxes and fewer hedgehogs.” Unfortunately, foxes are “woefully underrepresented, if not on the endangered list altogether.”
Talk of innovation is fashionable among business leaders today, Dabscheck writes, but they “…still run their organizations much as they have always done—prizing the expertise and execution of the hedgehog.
The resulting scarcity of fox-like thinking has led to a predictable gap between the professed desire for innovation and results.”
He cites a 2013 Accenture survey of executives in which 93% of respondents believed innovation was necessary for long-term success while only 18% thought their approach was delivering a competitive advantage.
Dabscheck suggests we are both foxes and hedgehogs, but corporations today reward our hedgehog mindsets. “If we care about innovation,” he concludes, “an affirmative action plan to cultivate our inner fox is urgently needed.”
Are you a fox or a hedgehog?