III. Digital Speeds Up the Answer, but Reality Improves the Question
- Matthieu Sinclair
- Jun 1
- 9 min read
This article (4/7) is part of the series Principle of Action No. 2: Thinking with Your Hands, from the collection “The Other Path.”
There’s a belief deeply embedded in our managerial culture: to act, you must first understand. To solve, you must first analyze. Putting something into practice comes after the thinking, as if to validate reasoning that’s already been formed.
That belief is more than questionable. It’s true for part of what we need to know, but the other part only becomes accessible through action. Putting yourself in a situation, experimenting physically, opens access to three types of information your computer screen will never deliver.
A. First Type: Problems Invisible from the Desk
Have you ever watched someone play a carnival game? I’m thinking, for example, of that fiendish game, “Cover the Spot,” where the goal is to completely cover a circle by placing 5 disks, each slightly smaller in diameter than the circle drawn on the table.
The game looks childishly simple: you pick up the pieces, reach out, gently place your first disks… and suddenly, something changes. Your body can’t manage what your brain thought would be so easy: what you were observing from the outside was an abstraction, but what you experience from the inside is a reality of an entirely different nature. In this game, the geometric constraint is actually so strong that succeeding is almost impossible unless you’ve trained extensively to reach that goal.
Stanford’s design-thinking bootcamp put it this way: very often, we settle on the wrong solution because we framed the problem wrong to begin with. Resistance from reality reveals difficulties that abstract analysis hadn’t anticipated. It’s not that we were incompetent — it’s that certain information only exists in situ: it only appears through physical confrontation with the real.
At Paradoxa, we know a thing or two about this.
Designing a stage illusion looks, from the outside, like a matter of inspiration and know-how. From the inside, it’s mostly a string of prototypes, tests, partial failures, frustrations, and fresh starts. Everything looks perfect on paper, but take my word for it: almost nothing works on the first try under real conditions, and what fails is almost never what we’d anticipated.
The most surprising thing in this process is the nature of the real sticking points.
You’d expect to run into complex technical difficulties. In reality, it’s often details of stunning simplicity that derail weeks of work. A material that’s impossible to find because it’s too rarely used to be kept in stock. A trivial physical constraint, invisible from a desk, that makes the whole thing unworkable as designed. A gesture that seemed natural in our imagination and that, in the reality of the stage, isn’t natural at all.
The prototype isn’t just there to find solutions, it’s there to make the real problems visible, and therefore nameable. It turns an intuition no one would have listened to into a reality no one can deny. The only way to see these details is to put yourself in the situation early enough to have the time and opportunity to solve them.
In the world of customer experience, there’s an institutional answer to this question: the mystery shopper. You know the principle: send someone to test the real experience your customers have, without the reassuring filters of dashboards and satisfaction surveys. What the mystery shopper reveals is often unsettling: the gap between what we believe we deliver and what we actually deliver is structural. It exists everywhere, in every organization, at every level. The mystery shopper isn’t just a control tool, it’s more of an institutionalized form of humility. It says: what we believe we do and what we actually do are two different things, and only physical confrontation with reality can show us the gap.
When was the last time you experienced your own product or service from your customer’s exact position, with no filter, no advance briefing, without being recognized?
If the answer is “a long time ago” or “never,” you’re managing an abstraction. You’re making decisions about an experience you no longer know from the inside. The mystery shopper isn’t a luxury tool reserved for big retail chains: it’s simply the decision to become, for an hour, an ordinary customer inside your own organization.
The Error That Teaches vs. the Error That Frustrates
There’s an asymmetry, in my view, that no one ever mentions in debates about digital versus analog: a manual error is infinitely more legible than a digital error. And because of that, it teaches far more.
When your code crashes, you get an error message, often cryptic, rarely useful:
NullPointerException at line 247Great. Now what?
When your cardboard model collapses, you understand exactly why: the center of gravity was too high, the base wasn’t wide enough, the joint didn’t hold. Concrete failure teaches better, because the cause of failure is legible. It doesn’t hide behind an error message. The clay resisted your gesture, and in that resistance, it taught you, it co-created with you. When software resists, you’re no longer in dialogue with matter, you’re enduring or working around the limitations of an interface: that’s a power struggle, not a relationship of resonance.
My Personal Rule: Multiply by 2.5. Always.
Over time, I’ve built into my own decisions an empirical rule that experience has made indispensable. Whenever I need to produce an estimate — whatever kind, a timeline, a projected budget, or anything else — I mentally multiply it by 2.5.
The origin of this ratio is less glamorous than you might imagine. It goes back to the early days of personal GPS devices, which were terrible at estimating Parisian traffic jams. Before every show, I got in the habit of looking at the estimated time and multiplying it by 2.5. The result was remarkably reliable. Over time, I noticed that this ratio worked with uncanny effectiveness in fields far removed from Parisian traffic: delivery times, development budgets, drafting proposals. It’s not pessimism, it’s what I’d call experience converted into a number: realism with a decimal point.
Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke put it concisely: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Mike Tyson put it even more bluntly in 1987, before his fight against Tyrell Biggs: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The line applies just as well to corporate projects. The “enemies” don’t wear uniforms: they’re supplier delays, technical constraints invisible on paper, user behaviors nobody had modeled.
In our presentation Thinking and Acting Differently in the Age of AI, we explore the mechanisms of overconfidence.
The most spectacular example remains the Sydney Opera House: an initial budget of 7 million Australian dollars, a final cost of 102 million. Planned timeline: 4 years. Actual timeline: 14 years. Architect Jørn Utzon left the project before it was finished and never saw his work completed.
To be entirely fair, the Sydney Opera House is today one of the most recognizable and beloved buildings in the world. That doesn’t validate the project management approach, but it does give us something to think about when it comes to what “success” means. The question isn’t whether forecasts will be wrong. It’s by how much.
One of the habits we explore in this presentation: thinking in ranges rather than fixed points, and systematically defining the bounds of what’s possible before committing. What the field almost always reveals is that the real difficulties were invisible from behind a screen.
That’s why the most useful question isn’t “Is my plan good?” but “How well does my organization surface information from the people in direct contact with reality?”
B. Second Type: Solutions You’d Never Have Found Sitting Down
The reverse is just as true, and perhaps even more surprising. Putting yourself in a situation doesn’t just reveal difficulties, it also reveals paths that abstract thinking would never have produced.
In our presentation Thinking and Acting Differently in the Age of AI, we put participants in front of a problem that, from their seat, seems perfectly unsolvable.
An audience member is invited on stage. The situation presented to them seems to put them in an uncomfortable position: their actions could damage a colleague’s phone, placed on the floor. The risk feels real and immediate, and the tension in the room is palpable. And yet, something unexpected happens — and it’s precisely that unexpected element that guarantees everything turns out fine.
I won’t say anything more: those who experience it will understand why. But what consistently happens in the room at that exact moment is always the same, and always valuable: participants realize they had mentally built a prison whose bars never existed. The physical experience didn’t just solve the problem, it dissolved the flawed mental picture that had made it seem unsolvable in the first place.
This is, in fact, the precise definition of a successful illusion. A magician doesn’t trick the eyes: they build a mental picture so coherent that the spectator stops looking at what’s actually in front of them. Putting yourself physically in a situation does exactly the opposite: it dismantles the mental picture by forcing contact with reality. That’s why we’ve built our interactive presentations around lived experience rather than lectures: you don’t escape a mental prison by thinking about it, you escape it by trying to stand up and walk out.
There’s an experience most parents have had at least once, with a mix of bafflement and wonder. You give a sophisticated toy to a four-year-old. They look at it for thirty seconds, then abandon it and spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the cardboard box it came in.
This isn’t ingratitude, it’s a form of cognitive awakening: the cardboard box can be a boat, a castle, a cockpit, a house, an oven, a treasure chest. It imposes nothing, but suggests everything. The child hasn’t yet learned that the box is a box: to them, it remains a possibility.
This is what psychologist Karl Duncker formalized as functional fixedness: the mental block that stops us from using an object for anything other than its assigned function. A box of thumbtacks is a box of thumbtacks, and nothing else. Its name locks in an identity, and that identity forbids any other existence. It’s a cognitive reflex that gets reinforced with experience and expertise. Expertise, paradoxically, can sometimes become a prison. At what exact moment did we lose that? At what moment did the box become, once and for all, just a box?
In your organization, in your line of work, what’s the box you keep seeing as just a box, when it could be something else? What’s the problem you keep framing the same way, year after year, simply because that’s how it’s always been framed?
The only way to recover the child’s eyes staring at the box is to put yourself back in the situation.
That’s why we systematically film our new shows during the first few months, with a simple phone set up at the back of the room. Not just to build an archive, but because we know with certainty that the stage will produce things the script never anticipated: an unexpected reaction from the audience, a spontaneous rewording that lands better than the prepared version, or a silence falling at the wrong moment that reveals a poorly built transition. This information doesn’t exist before the performance. It’s born from the contact between what we prepared and what the room gives back.
Every great stand-up comedian shares this discipline. You test a line, a rhythm, a joke. And very often, a phrase improvised in the heat of the moment beats a version worked on for weeks. Iteration doesn’t begin in the head, it begins on stage.
C. Third Type: The Art of Discovering What You Weren’t Looking For
There’s a word for this third, and one of the most precious and least cultivated, forms of information: serendipity. What Horace Walpole described in 1754 as “unexpected discoveries, made by accident and sagacity”, things you find precisely because you weren’t looking for them.
What needs to be understood, and it’s the point popularization often distorts, is that serendipity isn’t pure chance. Sylvie Catellin, who devoted a landmark book to the subject, is categorical: without receptiveness to the unexpected, without imaginative freedom, there is no serendipity. What produces something is chance, encountered by someone who was in the act of doing, of experimenting — and who was therefore in a state of receptiveness that purely abstract reflection never generates.
My partner Sébastien Clergue, a permanent consultant to David Copperfield and his Magic Lab, once told me the following story. In 1987, Copperfield was presenting what would become one of his most famous illusions: his own body, cut in half by an enormous circular saw, in full view of everyone. No suspicious box, no assistant playing a supporting role, just a table, a saw, and a man cut in two. A true revolution in the art of illusion.
This illusion is nearly 40 years old but remains spectacular even today. During one of the earliest performances, at the exact moment his body was split into two halves, separated by more than two meters, a spectator in the audience spontaneously shouted: “Move your feet!”
That wasn’t planned, it wasn’t in the script, but it was possible. So Copperfield moved his feet… and the room exploded with astonishment.
What was already a very successful illusion had just crossed a further threshold: the separated body was obeying an order shouted from the audience. Starting the very next day, a staff member was assigned to shout “Move your feet!” at just the right moment. And that happened, at every performance, for years, so that the miracle would always seem to arise from chance.
Serendipity hadn’t just improved the illusion. It had changed its very nature.
AI optimizes known spaces of possibility, with an efficiency we can’t match. But it can’t be surprised by something it wasn’t looking for, because it’s never actually performing. Serendipity requires a body in the moment.
Pasteur put it precisely: “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” And I’d add: “the prepared mind, and busy hands.” Stay behind your screen, and you maximize control while minimizing your exposure to the unexpected. Put yourself in the situation, and you increase your surface of contact with what you didn’t know you were looking for.
It’s the dialogue between practice and thought that allows for real progress — not one without the other. Raw experience alone, of course, isn’t enough: a manager who has weathered twenty crises may have drawn the same wrong lesson twenty times over. That’s where theory reclaims its place: not as a starting point, but as a mirror.
