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Maree's Blog

Is it a mystery or a puzzle?

Are we living in a puzzle or a mystery? 

When I attended The Future: Disrupted & Reimagined with Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt in early December Malcolm gave two keynotes. His second keynote focussed on the words ‘puzzle’ and ‘mystery’ and the differences in these words. 

It was a pleasure to see a glimpse of how Malcolm thinks and his curiosity mindset. Who else would consider taking these two words and linking future strategies around their meaning? 

Malcolm spoke about a puzzle as an absence of information and the need to gather data to determine a course of action and solve that puzzle. 

A mystery is where information has already been gathered, in fact too much, and not knowing how to deal with it. Mysteries are complex and more difficult to solve. 

Each one requires a different strategy to move forward. And as we are moving to a world of increasing data overload our need to be able to manage mysteries in meaningful ways becomes ever more important. 

Malcolm uses stories to make the complex simple, while keeping the audience front and centre. He is always asking: ‘how much do I need to say to make the story work’? His curiosity mindset could easily take him deep into multiple rabbit holes and yet he is able to make his ideas succinct, interesting and relevant. 

I’m looking forward to seeing how his current thinking transitions into his next book.  

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