There comes a point when how you think imposes tangible limits on what you can think.

A problem is recognized — felt — but when you try to think it out, you arrive at the edge of thinkability. You cannot resolve this problem with the intellectual moves that ordinarily work to resolve your everyday problems.

If you are precise and honest with yourself, you will realize something disturbing: at this point what you most painfully lack is not an answer, but a clear question. You cannot even articulate the problem.

Our minds do not know what to do with such a situation. We don’t even know how to talk about this experience. We are completely oriented by metaphors of objects existing positively in a negative space that’s given: and this space is reality itself.

But here, the very space for the problem is lacking. Our minds boggles at this, just as it boggles when we try to contemplate what stands beyond the limits of space, or what occur beyond the limits of time. It is literally inconceivable.

Such situations are not uncommon, even in the flatlands of business. So we might as well agree on some vocabulary for this situation:

• An inarticulate problem that remains inarticulate because it stands outside the current limits of thinkability is a perplexity.
• The distinctive, painful feeling that accompanies perplexities is anxiety. This feeling is always uncomfortable, but when it is accepted as the birth pangs of genuinely new idea it becomes a far more acceptable part of the labor and delivery of innovations.
• The limits of thinkability in a particular approach to a problem is an intellectual horizon.
• Perplexities are resolvable by the peculiar and perpetually misunderstood activity known as philosophy.

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What? Philosophy useful in business?

Ask a dozen people to list the ten most useless things any person can do, and philosophy will top the list. When an exasperated project manager exclaims “We don’t have time to philosophize!” nobody questions the wisdom of such practical thinking — or its practicality.

However, it is precisely here, when a group faces situations it does not know how to think out — where people become most anxious and most impatient and most inclined to just pick something and go with it — that philosophy is most useful and is in fact the very cornerstone of eventual success.

According to Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.” Is this not exactly when a company goes outside and hires someone to help it find its way out of a problem it doesn’t understand?

Yet, even consultancies — companies whose very purpose is to help other companies in this situation — are stuffed with anti-philosophical “pragmatists” whose life purpose is to simply get things done. Under the stress of anxiety such people reject the very thing that will bring them success. They stop thinking, stop listening and put their noses to the millstone.

This is how most of their projects go. Most of their projects turn out pretty unspectacular, but since they’ve never experienced a spectacular outcome, and because spectacular outcomes are uncommon, anyway, nobody blames them, nobody blames their client for their unspectacular, unlovable, unexceptional non-success, and nobody gets fired — so good enough. And emails go out calling the bunt a home run, and an assemblage of best practices an innovation, etc., etc. etc. and this is what makes corporations so damn corporate. But at least they didn’t have to confront anxiety.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

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The reason few companies innovate is not that they lack intelligence or ingenuity or ideas — it’s that they are organizationally unprepared to face the perplexities and the anxiety intrinsic to innovation.

They misdiagnose the painful feelings of things going right as something going dreadfully wrong, and inadvertently abort the innovation process.

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Most people, most of the time will try to make the absence of a clear question go away by making up things that resemble answers, that seem more or less related to what the question could be or ought to be. As long as the answer fits the shibbolethic standards of the culture to which it is addressed (that is, it has an appropriately truthy consistency) and does not offend or impinge on anyone (inconsequentiality is the surest strategy for accomplishing this), it is generally accepted as an answer.