Guild Pain Point #4 : Superficiality
Attempting the swim out of the shallow end of analysis and understanding
Author: Sean Moffitt . Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
“Only strong characters can resist the temptation of superficial analysis.” — Albert Einstein
Grey Swan Guild’s Seven Pain Points for Making Better Sense of the World
These are the seven things that confront our mission. We obsess about them. We seek to overcome them. We seek to navigate around them. We seek to alleviate the bad consequences of them. They are pain points.
We are profiling our fourth one here, it falls into the lazy camp, amplified by popular search and generative tools at our disposal, that make it easy to not take the extra step in effort or analysis — it’s the pain point of Superficiality.
IV. Superficiality
Our Guild’s mission is making better sense of the world together, thus creating avenues that foster deeper, more meaningful engagement with data, tools and perspectives. Boil together the current surfeit of information, lowering attention spans (see visual below), the rush to quick conclusions (and even quicker news cycles), with the seemingly looming time pressures and constraints on nearly everybody, and you have a vast ocean of superficial evaluation. The world has become wafer-thin slicers of shallow points of view.
Given the commodification of many forms of data, economic pressures to act fast, education by rote memorization rather than true critical thinking, and social media gluttony that reinforces convenient falsities at every turn, we have a superficiality crisis on our hands. The Buzzfeed-ification of how we think is pervasive.
When it come to intelligence, our Guild attempts to overcome superficiality by exploring collisions across industries, functions, time periods and certainties. With Guild events, we prefer to host expert panels than single person lectures to explore the full range of opinions on a topic. With Guild community, we try to tackle questions of profound significance and create environments where we can hold two or more thoughts in our heads at the same time. On our Guild ventures, whereas some are built for agility or provocation, at least half of these initiatives are designed to go beyond the surface of what other peer organizations and platforms might do.
Facets of our Pain Point Supericiality:
The Guild has seen time-and-time again the dumbing down of the average population. Keynote speakers would rather spin repeatable catchy lines than truths. Year-end trend reports alternate between utopias and the patently obvious. Many news bureaus don’t even try to get to the truth anymore, jumping into thinly veiled spin and rhetoric before even events finish. There is something that has become incredibly shallow in our previously-trusted institutions. We try to overcome these worst parts of superficiality:
- Lack of Context: Thin analysis often ignoring the broader picture, crucial for understanding the full implications of data, insights, or an issue.
- Skimming Facts: Highlighting of major points or facts, or cherry picking data, that supports a pre-determined conclusion, without considering the full data set, deeper review, or exploration.
- Straight-lining Trends: Anticipating the dominant general trends or patterns that will continue into the future without investigating underlying factors, triggers, shifts, anomalies and wild cards (we call them Grey Swans).
- Visual Manipulation: Using visuals like infographics, graphs or charts that give a quick understanding and slanted views, without capturing the full story.
- Framing Limitations: Reporting fundamental drivers without deeper analysis and in the absence of chasing down the dependencies and critical factors.
- Safe Knowledge: Relating topics to widely known information, or incumbent opinions, without accepting the possibility of new paradigms at play.
- Preliminary Conclusions: Drawing initial conclusions based on first or obvious observations, and disregarding how past contexts, fuller sensemaking, and future shifts may interpret things differently.
- Qualitative Hearsay: Noting qualitative felt aspects like appearance or mood without quantifying them, providing evidence, or even pointing to faint, early signals.
- Absent Implications: Discussing an issue without providing implications, long-term or indirect effects, or backcasting to actions that could remedy future developments now.
- Critical Examination Gaps: Analysis failing to critically evaluate the credibility of sources, history arcs, or key assumptions made, leading to skewed conclusions.
- Ignoring Counterarguments: Omitting alternative perspectives, debate, hedges or counterarguments, emphasizing coherence overr multi-sided views.
The Guild’s Response to Superficiality
Instead of superficiality, the Guild goes for depth — depth of research, depth of key factors, depth of meaning, and depth of implications.
We do this through:
Experiences — Events: our longest standing annual marquee event is our Day of The Swan, a twenty-four hour sensemaking event that confronts complexity across a wide range of topics and connects the dots between disparate developments, geographic contexts and narratives.
Intelligence — The Bank: our soon to be produced foresights platform that unfurls 300+ future forces, trends and Grey Swans across over twenty five distinct domains.
Community — 50 Shades of Grey Swan Thinkers and Do-ers: unlike nearly every other intelligence, experience and venture-based institution, we attract and bring together fifty different audiences from academics to visualizers, and harness their collaborative potential.
Ventures — Real Time Uncertainty Monitor: a group of people committed to surfacing an up-to-date and moving timeline analysis of the amount of uncertainty that exists in the world, our anxiety felt from it, and the key drivers involved.
Read up on the other Pain Point posts
Pain Points for Making Sense of the World Overview :
Uncertainty — Guild Pain Point #1
Bias & Noise — Guild Pain Point #2
Negativity — Guild Pain Point #3
Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action
if you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and ourparticular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild Linkedin page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in July. Here’s the link.
New Member Regatta — July’24: https://bit.ly/gsgsregattajuly24
