You Can't Squeeze Creativity From a Pie Chart

In a celebrated scene from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride, a fierce battle of wits takes place between the evil Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) and the masked hero, Wesley (Cary Elwes).

Boasting how smart he is ("You've heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? ... Morons!"), Vizzini is convinced he can logically figure out which of two goblets of wine carries the deadly toxin iocaine.

Brimming with confidence, Vizzini takes Wesley through his reasoning process: A clever man would put the poison in his own goblet, because he would know that only a fool would reach for what he is given. But Wesley would know that Vizzini could figure that out, and would therefore choose the goblet in front of him. On the other hand...

After continuing the argument for several minutes, Vizzini triumphantly snatches the goblet in front of his antagonist and drinks, as does Wesley. While boasting about how clever he's been, however, Vizzini drops dead. Wesley had poisoned both goblets. He had spent several years building up resistance to iocaine, and thus remains completely unaffected by it.

Wesley's stratagem is a classic illustration of smart-world thinking trumping analytical reasoning. Vizzini, for all his logic, never even considers the possibility of creating immunity to the poison. It isn't even on his radar.

Business has been well served by analytical reasoning. It lies behind everything from ERP and CRM systems to strategic decision algorithms to the "rational choice" model that supposedly explains the behavior of homo economicus.