M.022 Mary's room

Which room are you sitting in?

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Let me introduce you to Mary. She is a brilliant scientist, specializing in colors, and in particular in the color red.

Mary has studied red since she was a kid, and knows everything there is to know about the colour. She knows the physics of light, the neurophysiology of vision, it's history in arts, politics and society, and much much more.

Besides knowing everything there is to know about red, something else is also remarkable about Mary: She has spent her entire life in a black and white room. In other words: she has never actually seen the colour herself.

The story of Mary and her room certainly has some wacko kidnapping-story-vibes to it, but it’s not a true crime. It’s a famous thought experiment from philosopher Frank Jackson.

Jackson’s point with the story of Mary was to set up the following question: if Mary leaves her room and sees a red tomato, will she, the woman who knows everything there is to know about red, learn anything new about the colour?

Seeing red

Philosophers apparently still debate the answer to Jackson’s question, but I am in the camp that lands on a clear yes. Even if Mary knows everything there is to know about the colour red, she can still learn what it’s like to see and experience the color firsthand.

This learning is something philosophers call qualia, and refers to knowledge or insights that can’t be captured by physical explanations alone.

When I first heard Jackson’s thought experiment, it struck a nerve. As an academic, I am Mary. Sitting in my black and white room.

While I surely don’t know everything there is to know about strategy, the parallel to the question with Mary is clear: To what extent can our books, teachings and research teach us everything we need to know about strategy decision making? And what does it mean to see red in my field?

Stepping out of the room

Ever since I was a PhD student, I have kept a foot in “reality” (which is what academics call life outside universities). I do consulting work, give workshops and talks for firms and leadership groups, and advise leaders.

For long, I thought these experiences gave me that firsthand experience of strategic decision making that books can’t teach us. That it made me see what red looked like.

But I was wrong.

Seeing red in my field is not about advising others to make strategic decisions. It’s about owning a decision yourself and bearing the weight of its consequences. This is personal, and must be learned outside the room.

I know because I have seen red myself. Just not from advising others.

When theory meets reality

The first episode that comes to mind is from 2011, when NHH celebrated its 75 year anniversary.

I was a first year PhD student at the time, and learned that the school had planned an art project in relation to the anniversary. Instead of gifting some prints to prominent guests (which was the original plan), I pitched a different type of art project to the school CEO: use the money to invite a bunch of famous street artists to critique capitalism on the big white walls of NHH.

To my surprise, both the CEO and Victor Norman, the leader of the anniversary committee, not only liked the idea, but gave me money and freedom to drive the project. To own the strategic decisions. Since it was an art project, and NHH is a business school, few others were really interested. Which suited me perfectly.

I hired a couple of master students to help me, and got the underground festival Nuart from Stavanger on board as a project partner.

The concept was simple: five street artists, representing the “man in the street”, were given full freedom to comment on capitalism on the huge white exterior walls of NHH. We also planned to end with a showcase seminar where street artists, fine artists, professors and authors would continue the discussion indoors.

Long story short: just weeks before the king was supposed to roll into NHH to mark the 75 year anniversary, the first artists arrived. And my palms were dripping with sweat.

What had I put in motion? What happens if the first artist painted something that would not land well with those who trusted me with this project, or with the rest of the school? Was the project title “____capitalism?” too much an invitation to get “F**K capitalism” spray painted all over NHH weeks before the grand anniversary celebrations?

Many of the decisions that months earlier felt bold and fun, suddenly felt borderline crazy. And there was no turning back.

To my relief, everything turned out even better than I hoped. The artists delivered, their works sparked interesting discussions in NHH’s hallways, and the project even received some international attention.

But looking back, what I remember most clearly is the weight my own decisions put on my shoulders. Knowing that if the whole project goes to shit, it’s on me. That it was my idea and my decisions that would have led to that outcome.

How to cope with this feeling was not something I had learned in any strategy classes as a student. It was something completely different.

A more recent example of seeing red comes from cofounding a company, OAO, in late 2022.

From the text books and case studies, building a startup is often distilled down to some big key strategic decisions.

In reality, it’s an endless list of ongoing strategic decisions. Some large. Many small. And the high pace and resource constraints means that many of those decisions are made more on intuition than being based on the rigorous analyses we teach in class.

I talk about startups and their strategic decisions in class, but making them myself is indeed different. Not in logic, but in knowing it’s your own company, your own money, and your own friends that bear their consequences. Making strategic decisions in a startup is just different in ways that theory alone can’t teach.

So I’ve had enough experiences with red to know that there are more colors than black and white out there. What then happens when we bring that experience back into the room?

The view from outside

Take Kodak, the poster child of disruption. It’s easy to analyse their decisions in retrospect, and conclude that it's leaders made the wrong strategic choices. I have done it myself countless times in class.

But bringing in the Mary’s Room lens acknowledges that there are things we just can’t learn from secondhand sources alone.

In 1999, the Kodak stock was trading high, digital cameras were inferior and expensive, and the added value of having images in a digital format was still unclear. If you were a Kodak executive at this time, what decisions would you have made?

Would you have opted to reallocate resources from the certain profits of analog photography to the still immature digital alternative? Even if you had anticipated all the complementary changes in internet, operating systems, internet connectivity, laser printers and social media that would happen the next 4-5 years, would you have made a different decision than the Kodak executives did at the time?

It’s difficult to say, because there are pieces missing from the puzzle when we see it from the outside. The knowledge about how it felt to be the ones making these decisions.

The classroom, it turns out, is also a room.

Stepping out

I still spend most of my time in the professor’s room, teaching, researching and writing about strategy. But over the years, I have become more aware that I am sitting in a room, and that there is much to be learned by stepping out. And much to be improved by taking those learnings with me back into class.

In AI workshops with executives, I have even used Mary’s Room as an introduction to sessions where participants build with AI themselves. To make them explicitly aware that watching demos and reading consultant reports about AI capabilities is one thing; feeling the magic and frustrations of trying to build something yourself, is something else.

I have come to believe that most can benefit from being curious about which rooms we’re sitting in. And from time to time reflect on what we might learn by stepping out when we have the chance.

Because reading about a red tomato isn’t quite the same as seeing one yourself.