Originally published on Medium on September 15, 2018.
In Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Silver discusses a metaphor of the fox. The basic metaphor came from a fragment of writing by a Greek poet, Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.” This concept was expanded on in a well known essay by Isaiah Berlin (which I’ve never read) and then has since been widely used in many contexts. (Background info from Wikipedia.)
The two uses of this metaphor that I am most familiar with are from Jim Collins’ Good To Great and from Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. These make an interesting contrast. Both use the metaphor to good effect, yet they come to opposite conclusions on which animal we should emulate.
It is important not to read too much into this difference. This is just a metaphor, and metaphors are meant to highlight concepts, not replace them. Yet I find it interesting to compare these two metaphors and see why they come to favor different animals. It tells us something about both.
In Good To Great, the hedgehog represents focus. In particular, it represents a big, ambitious, stable goal that a company or person aims to accomplish. The hedgehog recognizes that if we are always changing direction, then we will never reach our goal. Goals require time and they require focus. The fox represents goals that are always shifting based on a changing external environment. In this metaphor, foxes do not only react to changes, they overreact. The fox is always going after the Next Big Thing and never sticking with it long enough to achieve success.
In The Signal and the Noise the hedgehog represents a Grand Narrative. In particular, the hedgehog sees all predictions of the future and interpretations of the past and present through the lens of their Narrative. They are excessively confident in their predictions and in the ultimate fit of reality to their vision. The fox represents flexibility. The fox has a model. They constantly update that model in light of new evidence. If the model does not fit the data, then it is the model that needs to go, not the data. Foxes expect the world to be complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable.
As noted above, one way to resolve this is to just say that these are different uses of the same metaphor and move on. However, I think that this difference tells us something slightly deeper. Being a hedgehog, having one big idea which shapes what we do, is useful when we are setting and working toward a goal. Being a fox, looking at the world through the lens of many small, shifting ideas, is useful when we are interpreting or predicting reality.
This can, approximately, be summed up by another of the principles from Good To Great: Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith). To use Silver’s and Collins’ metaphors in ways that they did not intend, we should call on our fox like tendencies to face the facts, especially when those fact fail to fit our overarching narrative. We should call on our hedgehog tendencies to keep faith and focus even in the face of brutal facts which bring into question the specific actions we are taking to reach our goal.
On a more personal note, when it comes to debates — which are usually more about prediction and interpretation than goals and vision — hedgehog tendencies are one of the most frustrating personality traits to deal with. The debating fox may, at their worst, never stick with one idea enough to develop a thread of conversation. The debating hedgehog, at their worse, stubbornly refuses to see the facts through anything other than their chosen lens. They may fail to acknowledge that they are looking at the world through a particular lens. You cannot debate a hedgehog — not really — because they will always pigeonhole you into to whatever tidy box fits their narrative. The fox’s conclusions are messier, but the fox is generally willing to change their mind given enough evidence. They are much better discussion partners.