Exploring the random variable and the space in between ...

One of my students provided a link to another great TED talk last week. This time it was a presentation by Shawn Achor. He talks about the "cult of the average" and shows a graph with a perfect trend line and one outlier above the curve. He then goes on to say that in courses, such as economics, we teach "how in a statistically valid way, to eliminate the weirdos, eliminate the outliers, to find the line of best fit". http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?And suddenly, I was back in my home discipline of economics, justifying the fact that in my PhD I wasn't dealing with a line of best fit, or indeed with equations or numbers of any sort (except of course the page!).  Rather, I was interested in the random variable at the end of the equation, where I think this most interesting area of entrepreneurship often occurs - where there has been an  "escape" from the cult of the average.

I think that entrepreneurs are able to "escape", to move beyond the normal because they see "the space in between". I discussed this in a book chapter I wrote a couple of years ago with a colleague that opened with a quote from a wonderful book by Lloyd Jones called "The Book of Fame" (2000, p.75). It is a fictionalised account of the 1905 All Black rugby tour of Great Britain where he describes the innovative style of play of the All Blacks (known as the Originals) as follows:

"how we think

The [opposition] saw a thing
we saw the space in-between
The [opposition] saw a tackler
we saw space either side
The [opposition] saw an obstacle
We saw an opportunity. " 

I think this is a wonderful way of describing entrepreneurship, of being able to see opportunities by seeing the space in-between and the space either side, of making connections and patterns that do not conform to the "line of best fit", a way of moving beyond the normal.