The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them

I’m Simon Roberts, a business anthropologist, author of The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them (Bonnier 2020) and founder of Stripe Partners. I’ve spent the last 20 years applying social science theories and methods to the strategic challenges of a wide range of global companies, including Intel, Facebook, Spotify, Google. My work has been covered by Bloomberg, The Financial Times, BBC Radio 4 and Quartz.

We live in a world in which data reigns supreme. Many organisations and business aspire to be data-driven. Big data rules the roost. And it’s great that we make decisions with data, and big data is powerful. But shouldn’t we question the way in which our commitment to data excludes other ways of making sense of the world, alternative sources of insight and trust in human experience and intuition?

I wrote the book to make a case for a different form of knowledge and understanding of the world. A form of knowledge that we all have but is hard to articulate and typically gets dismissed as mere ‘feelings but is at the heart of what it is to be human. It’s a form of knowledge that comes from direct experience and engagement with the world – something that many organisations are not designed to encourage.

It’s called embodied knowledge – an idea that experts from fields as diverse as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, cognitive science and the field of AI and robotics are all actively exploring. All these disciplines are hitching their wagons to the idea that body not only shapes how we think, but how we come to know.

My aim with the book has been to thread these different strands together in an approachable way, and to write a deep book but one that is practical too – for those in business, the world of creativity and design – and beyond. The case studies featured in the book demonstrate the power of direct (bodily) experience in producing successful business strategy, game-changing design and powerful marketing communications.

I hope that the value of my book is to restore people’s faith in their ability to make sense of the world without being solely reliant on data and to remind readers that our bodies are immensely powerful tools for understanding and making sense of data.

Writing the book has been a wonderful exercise in exploration for me. I’ve enjoyed immersing myself in ideas from a range of wonderful and illuminating fields of science and contemporary thought. It’s been a great way to learn (hopefully with some success!) to write clearly, accessibly and for a wide audience. And finally, it’s given me the license to write about many of the projects that my company has done over the last eight years which demonstrate the power of embodied knowledge. While publicity for the company was not the primary motivation for writing The Power of Not Thinking it has been a pleasure to include the work of my colleagues and clients in the book. If nothing else, it has given us at Stripe Partners further confidence in the idea of embodied knowledge which is central to so much of our work.

The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them (Published by Bonnier) is available to buy on Amazon. 

Connect with Simon: LinkedIn – Twitter – Instagram

Winners of The Business Book Awards 2021 will be revealed online on Tuesday 25th May 2021.