Reader,

What do shells, fossils, bones, horns, scientific instruments, maps, ancient coins, manuscripts, and strange or “marvelous” objects have in common?

You might have found them in a scholar’s or doctor’s or noble’s “cabinet of curiosities,” also called a wunderkammer, or “wonder room.” It was a collection of unusual, rare, beautiful, or puzzling objects popular in Europe from roughly the 1500s through the 1700s.

These cabinets of curiosities were important because they helped lead to the development of modern museums, natural history collections, and scientific classification. But they were different from modern museums because they were usually private, idiosyncratic, and organized around wonder rather than strict disciplinary categories.

Now, I don’t suggest you fill your office with a lot of “stuff”, but I think you might want to use this as a useful metaphor for examining the wicked world in which we operate. You might want to collect weak signals, anomalies, surprises, and unfamiliar evidence before patterns of change are obvious.

What might be in your mental “wonder room?”

A look into my wunderkammer

My regular readers know that my writing over the past twenty years has been a bit “eclectic.” So, as I was pondering that, I went to notebooks that have been cluttering my otherwise highly organized (just kidding) office.

I opened some drawers in my mental cabinet and noticed:

1. Artifacts

• Super-wicked problems
• Problems that refuse to stay solved
• Messes, especially Ackoff’s “formulate the mess”

2. Thinking Tools and Mental Instruments

• Systems thinking
• Skepticism
• Premortems

3. Historical Warning Objects

• Yellow journalism
• Pandemics and epidemics
• Texas winter power crisis
• Healthcare cyberattacks

4. AI-Era Anomalies

• Cognitive offloading to AI
• Disappearing entry-level learning paths
• Whether thinking skills become more valuable or less visible in AI-enabled firms

5. Leadership Relevance Specimens

• Why technically competent leaders still get surprised
• Why middle managers are accountable but not in control
• How private equity, AI, and cost pressure change the meaning of leadership

6. Business Model Oddities

• Slywotzky’s principle of value migration
• Professional services under AI pressure
• Businesses that look healthy while their relevance is leaking away

7. Useful Metaphors

• Radar screen
• Fog, signals, and noise
• Thinking across time

8. Diagnostic Puzzles

• When is a problem not really the problem?
• Why do smart leaders keep using default thinking?
• What should humans continue to do when AI can generate answers?

There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you.

What’s in your cabinet?

Your mental cabinet helps you deal with the future because it gives you a place to store, compare, and reinterpret weak clues before they become obvious trends.

Most people try to “predict the future.” Your wunderkammer can help you do something more useful: notice what is changing, make sense of it earlier, and prepare better responses.

Spend some time and see what’s in your mental wunderkammer. The stuff you’ve filed away just might help you ….

.... Learn from the Past – Deal with the Present – Intercept the Future.

Happy summer,

Bill

P.S., Navigating the Wicked World is a couple of weeks away from being released.