101 Business Ideas That Will Change the Way You Work

IDEA #3

The hedgehog and the fox – why experts get it wrong

Knowing too much can make your predictions less reliable.

What you need to know

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus once famously wrote, ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The philosopher Isaiah Berlin then appropriated this distinction to categorise great writers and thinkers into two camps: hedgehogs (such as Plato and Nietzsche), who see the world through one great big idea, and foxes (such as Aristotle or Shakespeare), who view it through multiple lenses. More recently, the Berkeley-based philosopher Philip Tetlock has used the analogy to explain ...