Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken, 1917
In business school, kudos went to the student who first figured out what the hell the case really was all about. It was all about being incisive, smart, able to cut to the chase. And I’ve been in lots of meetings (especially at McKinsey) where one person was able to take a step back, synthesize what everyone was getting at, and bring everything to a close.
Some of these people really were that smart, but I suspect that more than anything else they were really good at bringing an otherwise unproductive meeting to a fruitful outcome. Which, given the alternative, added plenty of value, but left many of the meeting participants feeling that much more dependent on the brilliance of that one person.
Immersion is the opposite of this lightning-fast brilliance. It means to deliberately delay judgment by listening a bit longer than you usually would, to actually resist the temptation to form and defend a hypothesis.
This goes a bit against human nature. It’s unpleasant to wade in ambiguity and contradiction too long, and our tendency is avoid more pain by drawing a conclusion, stick to it, and then find out later if we were all wrong. Especially if others who have struggled with the same problem are impatient about moving beyond it and ahead with other things.
Immersion is about moving beyond heuristics in order to build a robust set of insights, usually based on pulling together many facts and perceptions, and applying rigorous inductive reasoning.
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