Sui Generis

Sui Generis

            Sui generis means one of a kind, something unique. But, if we come across an unusual item of information, we do not consider it to be unique. We try to understand it in connection with a familiar pattern and make it part of that pattern.

            Forty thousand years ago, whilst hunting in the woods we see something glistening yellow in the dark. We immediately look for the other eye and the teeth. The object that glistens might be our lunch or we might be its lunch. Until we can get a better look – more information, we believe it to be an animal. Experience has trained us to expect to find one in the woods, anyway. However, it might just be dew reflecting on an autumn leaf.

            John Hume, the great 17^th century philosopher used the word ‘induction’ to convey the notion that the future will resemble the past. In other words, we learn from the past and apply that learning to our decisions about our future.

            In the world of business the future is always different from the past. I’ll bet that your business has changed in the last year – new customers, new employees, sales prices and buying prices and maybe many other factors.

            In companies, one enthusiastic customer writing a letter of praise extolling the wonderful service that she got from the front-line guy might be interpreted as meaning that we have a seriously good frontline service team. This might result in ‘excellent service’ being moved to the top of the marketing proposition.

            The truth might be more mundane – five minutes before the customer phoned,  grumpy George had just heard that his bet on ‘Archimedes’ in the 3:30 had romped home in first place at 10-1 odds - hence, the cheerful service. You need to verify by a spread of different events, such as regularly monitoring the customer feedback.

            If you can see faces when looking at the clouds, you are satisfying the natural tendency to form patterns out of random snippets of information. It’s OK to see patterns, but they must be verified by importing more information and testing the validity of the pattern. As the world of business is changing all the time, slowly or quickly, you will never experience exactly the same state of play again, so beware of making decisions based on the past.

            Looking for patterns is a good idea; when you find a new one you could be on to something very profitable. Just put a bit more work into verifying it.