MMRadio_Phebe Trotman - The Monday Morning Memo

“Never quit on your worst day.” That’s Lesson #1. It’s easy to remember and it’s valuable advice. But the story behind lesson #1 is what makes the lesson magical. Lesson #2 is equally insightful. “You can’t score goals if you’re not on the field.” Phebe Trotman retired as a soccer superstar to become a superstar business coach. The characteristics required to lead a championship soccer team are identical to those required to lead a championship team in business. Phebe Trotman is about to tell young Maxwell Rotbart everything he needs to know.

“Deductive Reasoning is Overrated

Modern culture worships at the altar of deductive reasoning. We have been taught that if premise 1 and premise 2 are both true, the deductive (syllogostic) structure of “if/then” will lead us to a third, irrefutable truth.

This is how that often goes wrong:

Premise 1: All birds lay eggs.
Premise 2: Snakes lay eggs.
Therefore: Snakes are birds.

We know that snakes are not birds, so we examine Premise 1 and Premise 2 to see which one is false.

Neither of them is false.

Ohhhhhh… now I see the problem. Even though “All birds lay eggs,” they are not the ONLY animal that lays eggs.

Our premise wasn’t false; it was incomplete.

It is easy to find a premise that is true, but it is hard to know whether your premise is entirely complete and perfectly locked.

If we did not already know that snakes aren’t birds, we would likely have embraced the conclusion.

The second problem with our birds and snakes example is that we did not begin with a larger premise and move to a smaller one. Deductive reasoning is – by definition – subtractive. Although our birds and snakes example followed the same if/then structure of deductive reasoning, it was actually inductive, which is addition rather than subtraction.

Inductive reasoning is often correct, but not always.

If you believe that ‘if/then’ always leads to the truth, then you are mistaken.

(Do you see what I did there?)”

- Indy Beagle

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