Instinct as a competitive advantage
Hey – Rob here.
When I was leaving university in 2009, the big rage was that we were knee deep into an Information Age, as a substitute to the Industrial one.
Information was going to be the great leveller, break down regional boundaries, and more knowledge meant more power to who wields it.
(For ease, yes I am conflating Information and Knowledge here, and I do know the difference, so please don't @ me as you're better than that.)
And while a lot of that is still true, I do wonder if it's gonna age itself quite quickly because – you guessed it – good ol' AI coming into the scene.
You see, information is indeed the source of a lot of power, but it's already pretty clear that that is a game we cannot win against LLMs and whatnot.
We simply do not have the computing power to process all the information they do, at the speed at which they do, and it's only gonna get tougher.
So what then?
Well, there's an emergent narrative around the importance of influence and trust as core personal and social values that will go in importance, sure.
But in the context of doing strategy for a living, where information is supposedly our power (which makes us "smart"), I have a different take.
If information is not our source of competitive advantage, then what is?
Instinct.
Look, you and I have done it and tried to see how much we could automate to AI by feeding it our briefs and asking "write me a strategy".
And whether that strategy is right or wrong is besides the point, because the real problem here is that even if it's right you can't know it's right.
Because to know it's right you'll need to have exhausted all sorts of other options yourself, and know that by exclusion of parts this is the right one.
In other words, just because AI is giving you (theoretically) the right information, it didn't help you cultivate the instinct you need to believe it.
To fight for it, to justify it, to know deep down it's the right thing to do.
It's a bit like presenting a case in court for which you did none of the investigation, so you know what you want to say but less so about why.
And as soon as someone challenges it, you start stumbling because you don't have enough conviction or learned experience to really argue for it.
So any room for reasonable doubt can easily break your argument, and then eventually Netflix makes a documentary about your court disaster.
You get the point.
And this matters because, as many of you, I grew up professionally on the idea that maximising information and knowledge was the killer move.
Except now, I see maximising our strategic instincts as the killer move.
And how do you do that?
By practising, by doing the hard yards, by exposing yourself to good shit so you start getting a feel for what good shit looks and feels like.
It's one of the reasons I like to see the Salmon Crew as a community of strategic practice, not just discussion, and want to do more of that in 2026.
But even outside of that, it's a core principle for anything we do in our daily lives and in support of where we want to take our careers next.
You're either sharpening your instinct, or you're dulling it.
Just like a blade, though maybe without less of the swagger.
