I have a bad habit that I suspect a lot of people who work on their own share. When a business decision needs making — what to build next, which direction to take a product, how to position something — I think about it for far longer than necessary. I build frameworks. I weigh options. I write notes to myself. I wait for more information. The actual answer, which is usually visible from the beginning, sits there quietly while I conduct elaborate proceedings around it.

I recognised this in myself while reading a 1916 business parable called Obvious Adams, by Robert R. Updegraff. The book's central character — Oliver Adams — is the opposite of this. When a client comes to him with a failing retail store, he doesn't convene a working group. He goes to the city, walks the streets around both stores for a day, and reports back. The second store is in the wrong location. The foot traffic goes the wrong way. Move it. The senior team had spent three hours in a meeting room arriving at nothing. Adams walked around for an afternoon and had the answer.

The difference isn't intelligence. Adams is, by every account in the book, less clever than the people around him. The difference is method. He gathers facts before he thinks. The team in the conference room was reasoning from reports. Adams was looking at the thing itself. And the thing itself — the actual street, the actual store, the actual flow of pedestrians — had the answer built in.