The New Yorker had an article that ran awhile back titled "How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules." by Malcolm Gladwell. I'm glad to see that the New Yorker has made this piece available for free.

How David Beats Goliath

I'm not planning to get into all the details here about the article itself. He talks of many instances where people come at a problem with no predefined ground rules or expectations. They look at it with a completely fresh and open mind and take a different approach. For example:

"It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins."

Lenat was in a tournament for military navel strategy and he ran some scenarios into a neural network to see how AI might approach them... He won this tournament twice before they created rules around the strategies used, to essentially kick him out of the tournament. On a side note these winning strategies resembled similar tactics used by terrorists.

Malcolm speaks to real-time processing of information to then determine the strategy. Typically this is done in batches, or batch processing; you analyze the situation by the current set of rules stated and then deploy your "new" strategy. Real-time processing allows you to take in the information with little or no context and roll out a strategy that suits the needs as you see fit. Often times this results in innovative winning approach that otherwise would never have been uncovered. He uses David as an example because if he played by Goliath's rules; strength and brawn, things might have turned out differently. Instead he did the unexpected, by running towards Goliath and using a slingshot. This both surprised and ultimately defeated Goliath.

Malcolm also uses his own experience with his daughters basketball team. None of the girls had ever truly played basketball. He ran them to get their endurance up and then played full court press against all the teams in the league. This resulted in an almost undefeated season until a ref on an opposing team started calling heavy fouls and the team had to go to half court press.

So what is it I'm talking about here? Perhaps I ramble a bit but the underlying theme here is to always do the unexpected; don't over think, over analyze or over research. Agency's always tend to come heavy with the process; a process built on old fundamentals, old ideas, traditional thoughts. Take a step back and try to unlearn the expected. Analyze everything in real-time; keep iterating in small steps and evolve.