Foxes, Hedgehogs and Hormozi nasal strips.

“πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing” Archilochus

7th century BCE Greece didn’t have LInkedin otherwise I’m sure this would’ve been picked up by any number of influencers, had a nasal strip slapped on it, Hormozi style captions added and viola - sage like business wisdom.  Cue the views.

In the absence of all that it had to wait until Isaiah Berlin picked it up in his 1953 essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ and then the engines really got motoring when Jim Collins somewhat immortalized it in his seminal work ‘Good to Great’.

And like all great tweet length, Naval-adjacent, insta-wisdom, it sounds great and you can look all intellectual but it’s potentially terrible standalone advice. 

Here’s why you need more foxes and less hedgehogs.  (AKA micro-niche blogger says Jim Collins was wrong) 

Why consultants love hedgehogs.

The hedgehog concept from the Good to Great perspective made a lot of sense. The hedgehog knows one big thing.

It was predicated on three fundamental questions:

• What are you deeply passionate about

• What can you be best at the world at

• What drives your economic engine

And for all you visual learners out there, it looks a lot like this;

The theory makes sense, it provides simplicity and focus, gives a common framework for discipline around objectives and it’s easy to find some real world examples of where it has worked. 

It’s like crack for consultants - buzzwords, venn diagrams, the promised land of focus and simplicity.

For bonus points some of you may have noticed that the venn diagram looks a lot like another favourite for the life coaches and LinkedInfluencers, Ikigai.

So what’s my beef? Where’s the problem?

It’s logical, applicable, scalable and saleable.  My man, just hit up your chosen AI app, whip up a pdf, call it a course and start selling this stuff.

Here’s my beef.

The Hedgehog can’t miss. 

The Fox knows many things.

The hedgehog is Resilient but the fox is Antifragile and they both have a place. 

Let’s set some parameters first - there are foxes and then there are foxes. 

There’s knowing many things (see Exhibit A)

Exhibit A

And then there is knowing many things in a constructive and useful way (see Exhibit B)

Exhibit B

Needless to say Exhibit B > Exhibit A

There is no value in operating randomly, throwing every idea and concept that pops into your slack notifications against an electronic whiteboard and hoping something sticks. This is not about glorifying chaos, it's about the strategic and thoughtful leverage of inevitable complexity, time and tides.

So why is the fox antifragile?

The Fox can do something the hedgehog cannot.

It can afford to take a swing and miss. 

In fact, its entire value proposition is based on that concept alone. 

You can call it creative destruction, iteration, curiosity, R&D. The fox knows that some things will work and others will not. There is an expectation of a degree of failure, pruning of the option tree as we hit dead ends, come up empty handed and maybe even go hungry for a night. 

But at the same time the fox is developing the capacity to tolerate time under tension, understanding and accepting a degree of risk for reward, developing skills and knowledge across what may look like unrelated fields but still find their way into the toolkit for use later on. 

The hedgehog has one tool, the fox has an ever evolving toolkit, one that is constantly tested and refined. The hedgehog is hardy but the fox is flexible, nimble, mobile and agile. Complexity and the need for fast adaptation are not the friend of the hedgehog. Just ask Kodak or Blockbuster.

So was Jim Collins wrong?

In short, no. 

He just hedgehoged himself into a corner.

To steal a quote from the great and wise Rory Sutherland;

"The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea."

You need foxes to deal with complexity and adversity, to explore and iterate, to find the riches in the niches. 

But you also need the hedgehogs to take what the foxes have discovered and parsed, and refine it into a functional and viable operationalised strategy. (how’s that for consultant speak)

Resilient hedgehog focussed organisations can, will and do survive. For a time.

Antifragile organisations integrate foxes early and then deploy the hedgehogs - and they don’t just survive, they thrive.