Mine the gap.
In a chaotic time like this one, some people find openings.
In my previous post, I wrote about my sorry failure to seize an opportunity to make billions. Today, let’s talk chaos theory and pinball.
During the 1930s, a Dartmouth math major named Edward Lorenz got addicted to the game. Soon after, town authorities banned it, declaring pinball to be a form of gambling. The players relied on luck, they said, not skill. Lorenz knew this wasn’t true; the better players won more often than not. But Lorenz realized that skill did not make as much of a difference as statistics would predict. The caroming pinball introduced an element that couldn’t be explained by either luck or skill. Lorenz devoted the rest of his life to exploring the gap. “The result was chaos,” he said.
Chaos opens up during caroming events. We tend to think that the greatest opportunities come from new discoveries—recent inventions, groundbreaking medicines, scientific breakthroughs, and the like. But as the political economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, the largest fortunes get made from people who reap the whirlwind that swirls from the chaos of technological change. Bridges destroy ferry businesses while aiding truck farmers, who get wiped out by industrial agriculture, which in turn helps birth the chicken McNugget. The automobile kills the harness industry while creating a market for personal cameras. Computers replace typewriters while enabling Amazon. And so on. Schumpeter famously described this phenomenon as “creative destruction”; but we can legitimately reframe the process as creative clearing. Wiping the slate clean. Creating the chaos that creates unforeseen opportunities at a slant, and opening up kairotic situations.
While twenty-four-hour news makes it easy to see the doom side of chaos, look a bit harder and you can see creative clearing going on all about you. The pandemic made the life of most teachers miserable, as school districts veered from in-person education to online to hybrid and back again. But a few teachers turned their Zoom classes into entertaining lessons and became online stars, opening up a new career in digital consulting. In healthcare, telemedicine services—a $50 billion industry in 2019—grew by 40 percent in 2020, leading to new opportunities in wearable medical devices, tele-radiology, software, and consulting. In each case, a bitter time of death and economic loss opened up a gap.
In the art of persuasion, the in-between times of opportunity are the persuasive moments, when an audience has not yet made up its mind and a choice must be made. A problem or gap needs a solution, and the time is ripe to sway people toward the decision you want.
It’s a time of crisis—a word that once had a more positive meaning than it does today.
Bear with me for a bit more etymology. A deep understanding of words can help you navigate chaos and redefine issues.
We get our notion of crisis from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision.” The kairotically skilled leader got his followers to line up behind a choice by using the persuasive powers of rhetoric. To the ancients, persuasion was as essential to decisions as today’s marketing is to business success. The kairos of an occasion was the time to persuade; the Greeks labeled this moment hypokrisis, literally “before the decision.” They saw decisions as a matter of contingency, applying wit and knowledge to solve singular problems and act on particular opportunities.
It didn’t take long for the more literal-minded, rule-bound Greeks to push back against this form of decision making. “Hypocrisy” took on its current connotation of insincerity and falsehood. Besides, throughout history, many people have tried to apply universal rules to every situation. What would Jesus do? What do the Commandments command? What spoke Zarathustra? Rule-lovers labeled the Sophists’ attention to kairos mere relativism. But while principles are important, so is kairotic attention to contingency. When your appendix swells, you want a surgeon who does more than just follow a textbook. The same is true of every major decision—when to marry, when to buy a house, whether to quit your job and start a business. Kairos lies at the beating heart of decisions.
Kairotic moments often come during a time of paradigm malfunction, when the usual norms no longer apply.
Einstein noticed that Newtonian physics failed to solve the problems of the universe beyond our solar system. Adam Smith realized that his rapidly industrializing culture was no longer bound by the ties of nobility. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn put it, these exceptional men were able to deal “with a world out of joint.”
In the best of times—those rare seasons when your part of the world seems perfectly in joint—most of us bask in all that evanescent fortune and think it will last forever. When the stock market is soaring, people buy stocks. When unemployment is low and the economy is booming, we take out car loans. When dotcoms look like the Next Big Thing, investors flock to dotcoms. Snowbirds literally flock to Florida in the winter, when the weather’s perfect. None of these actions constitutes a genuine opportunity. To be skillfully kairotic, you need to be somewhat contrarian, a bit of a Fool on the Hill who defies common sense by interpreting the sunset as the world spinning round.
I don’t know about you, but these days my head is spinning. We have a new President who loves creating chaos. My first instinct is to lock the door. But my rhetorical self says to find the opening.
Common sense and normal thinking rarely detect the big, life-changing opportunities.
Let’s start with one Fool on the Hill construct: seeing time as a place. Unlike us moderns, the ancient Sophists were much more geographically minded. They pictured ideas as points on the map, topoi, a topography of thought. It’s where we get our “topics.” Rhetoric students would create architectural maps in their heads with objects or symbols representing each thought. Instead of memorizing their speeches, orators would choose a path through these symbols. Ideas shared in common were “commonplaces.” And the space between these commonplaces—the areas of disagreement—were where arguments could take place.
These in-between spaces of belief were rarely stable. Circumstances change, and so do minds. Beliefs shift, blurring the boundaries between opposing ideas and ideologies. This gap between ideas forms a kairotic opportunity that serves as the place for decision. The Romans called this arguable space a situs, or site. We call it a situation. It’s the white space, a void to be filled to meet the moment.
You could say we’re in a situation at this very moment.
When scholars rediscovered the ancient rhetorical texts in the seventeenth century, they used this situational thinking, this idea of gaps between beliefs and ideas, to help form the scientific method. The modern philosopher Stephen Toulmin explained that science exists to fill chaotic gaps. “The gap between…explanatory ideals and actualities,” he wrote, “is a measure of the explanatory distance this particular science still has to go.” In other words, when reality fails to back up a current scientific theory or contradicts our general understanding of nature, then science has an obligation to fill the gap.
We’ve never needed this situational thinking more. In the next post, we’ll use it to explore the land of serendipity. Stay tuned.
thank you. this actually calmed me down a bit. Looking for the opening.