A blank page. Daunting, liberating, full of possibilities. Also, at times, a tad overwhelming.

It is a familiar challenge for many of those who have ever sat down to write, well, anything really. Where to start.

Recent introspection, as well as an enlightening conversation with a fellow founder, has led me to revisit – and rethink – our ever-growing discomfort with that blankness. Or rather, for sitting with it for a period of time.

Today, there is a more convenient alternative to the pacing, walking or staring into space that may have helped unblock us in the past. One that means we can almost forgo the uncertainty and the frustrating process of figuring out what we want to say.

And I wonder whether, in our eagerness to quickly arrive at a solution, we are overlooking something valuable that happens in the process that gets us there.

How marketing is understood rather than delivered is a theme I explore often. If that resonates, subscribe to follow along.

Are we losing patience with the thinking process?

When you can literally have an answer (though not necessarily a correct one) at the stroke of a few keys in record-time, it is easy to fall into the lull of convenience.

What struck me in particular during my conversation was that neither of us doubted our ability to think independently.

We knew that we could very well sit down with a blank page and work through ideas ourselves. After all, developing ideas from scratch was hardly unfamiliar territory. Yet choosing to work through an idea unaided without the convenience and speed of technology, somehow felt more difficult than it did before.

At what point have we determined that thinking time is an inefficiency that we need to eliminate? An inconvenient blip that makes us re-evaluate the effectiveness of our time management.

I would say that we have changed how we think about thinking itself. How we feel about our very ability and competence to think and reason unaided.

A second opinion

One thing I have learnt over the years of building a business without a team is how often it can feel like shouting into a vacuum. There is no one to challenge your thinking. Probe your reasoning. Tease out the nuances. Offer an alternative idea that morphs into something better.

Hence the appeal of a tool that offers the luxury of as many perspectives as you could possibly need or want to interpret.

Therein lies the contradiction. What can begin as a way of testing ideas and hypotheses can quickly become an overwhelming collection of countless possibilities. That easily discombobulate the very decisions you were trying to confidently make in the first place.

At the other extreme, the temptation is to completely skip perspectives altogether and accept the first generated answer it provides.

This has compelling implications for decision-making within a business.

The appearance of a strategy

Let’s take strategy development, for example. A business identifies a need for a strategy to address a particular challenge. Perhaps growth has stalled, a new market is being considered, or the leadership team are simply seeking a clearer direction.

The temptation is to move quite quickly towards something tangible and applicable. Be that a plan, a framework, a set of priorities, or a roadmap. This can be produced in minutes. Check and done.

However, I would challenge that the existence of a document does not mean that strategic thinking has actually taken place.

A useful strategy – not merely a document that states you have one – requires an understanding of the business, its capabilities and constraints, competitive environment, who the customers are and could be. The choices it is prepared to make, and those it isn’t.

A strategy may need an uncomfortable conversation. One that perhaps acknowledges that a market that was previously successful is no longer attractive. That an assumed competitive advantage is not actually that distinguished or unique. Or that pursuing one opportunity means deliberately rejecting another.

Those activities shouldn’t be bypassed in the hope of a quick strategy because a tool can generate a convincing-looking answer that most likely aligns quite neatly to the input you gave it.

A generated document can 100% describe strategic priorities. It can even give you a checklist of activities to get going. It cannot, independently, establish whether the business has reviewed and addressed its own realities.

The decision remains ours

We seek to leverage tools and technology to make processes simpler. Quicker. There is certainly incredible value in doing so. Maybe though, we should be asking ourselves which parts of the process we are trying to eliminate. There is a difference between accelerating work and bypassing the thinking which is needed to enable the valuable decision-making and strategising.

If a tool is meant to help us with our thinking but instead leaves us either grappling with too much, or not enough, challenge, how can we tell whether it is really helping us? Where and what are we placing value in?

Perhaps that is where we should consider our use of current tools. Not to remove our thinking, but to help us challenge, crystallise and evolve it. Without jumping straight to a fully generated answer. Equally, the importance of trusting in our own judgement and recognising when we have enough perspective on which to move forward, or not enough challenge of our assumptions.

I confess to find it fascinating that the tools that provide us with the opportunity to improve our thinking, may well be the same tools that – depending how we use them – help us lose confidence in them too.

For, as Descartes declared, “Cogito, ergo sum.”