Fractals

First edition of this Newsletter after my vacation! Let's get into action!

I would like to recommend a documentary available on Netflix: The colours of infinity. In this documentary, presented (nothing more and nothing less) by Arthur C. Clarke, explains the importance of fractal geometry, first developed by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou in the 1910s and then expanded by the French mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (and maybe this name sounds more familiar to you). A mathematics documentary? Yes, and it is extremely interesting. Fractal geometry is one of the bases with which you can explain the shapes that the objects around us acquire: from the wings of a butterfly, to the clouds, the vegetation... once you get into the explanations, doors and more doors open in your mind about how this geometry, which was only explored thanks to the development of computers with graphic representation capabilities, defines the world around us.

My brain, which always makes somewhat strange connections, started to relate Mandelbrot's Set and its behavior to a topic that I find fascinating and that lately is considered a problem instead of an advantage: overthinking. Basically, the relationship between the two is very similar: in any fractal, when you go deeper, the same level of detail emerges again and again and so on ad infinitum and the same thing happens when you are approaching a strategic problem and try to delve into it and innumerable details tend to appear which forces you to overthink and overthink. Is overthinking bad? Curiously in recent times people associate it with other pathologies such as anxiety and as an activity that consumes resources unnecessarily. "Go with the flow" people say (and there is nothing worse for a strategist than going with the flow).

Where is the breaking point, then? When is overthinking a useful tool and when is it not? When can we apply that "fractal geometry" and go down into details and details (which seem to have no end)?

There is a key rule when defining any kind of strategy and that is that in the different phases and layers defined by the person or group in charge of the strategy, the elements have to be under the control of the strategic designer.

But let's take an example: Many years ago, when Apple launched its iTunes player, one of its features was its ability to accept external plugins. That allowed a company to develop a plugin that made iTunes the entry point for a social network based on music listening: a very interesting project and one of the best social networks I've ever been a part of. But one day Apple decided that it would no longer allow plugins associated with iTunes and that social network simply died. They bet on a strategy with a key point that they couldn't control, with the illusion that this feature would be maintained over time (and it wasn't).

In any strategic action, it is important to define each of the points and that these are always under the control of the strategist or the strategy group, and that is where overthinking is important: on an element that you can control, you can go down and down in its multiple details (in the same way that you can go down in a Mandelbrot's Set) until you can make a thorough analysis and establish better connection points with the next phases of your strategy.