Traction Heroes Ep. 35: Axis Thinking

When I was a kid, I tended to view the world in stark black-or-white terms. Things were either amazing or terrible. People were brilliant or bozos. My dad would caution me: right answers often land closer to the middle of a spectrum than its extremes. Later in life, I read an essay called Axis Thinking, which organized these ideas into a coherent framework. Written by the musician, producer, and systems polymath Brian Eno, it appeared in his book A Year with Swollen Appendices. Axis Thinking has influenced how I consult. I wanted to hear Harry’s take, so I brought it as the focused reading on episode 35 of Traction Heroes. How has it changed my work, specifically? Eno put it well: Axial thinking doesn’t deny that it could be this or that, but suggests that it’s more likely to be somewhere between the two. As soon as that suggestion is in the air, it triggers an imaginative process, an attempt to locate and conceptualize the newly acknowledged greyscale positions. I am interested in…