It is known that a lost traveler makes a multi-kilometer meaningless circle back to the starting point. To verify this, in 2007, German researchers Jan Sowman and Mark Ernst set up an experiment on volunteers in the woods and deserts. It turned out that travelers do walk in circles if they cannot see the sun and the moon, or if they are blindfolded.
However, it turned out that the same person sometimes deviates to the left, sometimes to the right. Thus, walking in circles is not caused by differences in leg length or strength, but is most likely the result of a growing uncertainty about where the forward direction is [1]. So without landmarks to guide them, the walkers were relying on feedback from their bodies (proprioception) and their sense of balance. These cues can help over short distances, but Souman says that they soon build up “sensory noise” that renders them inaccurate and causes the person’s trajectory to drift both increasingly and randomly. Small errors lead to random walks, while larger errors cause circling. Small errors lead to random wandering, while large errors cause circling [2].
In business, one often has to act in smoke, fog, and darkness. In the short term, a founder’s intuition and extra effort can help a business survive uncertainty. But in the long run, as in the woods, you have to be wary of the accumulation of “sensory noise.” Knowing all this, savvy entrepreneurs establish a ritual once a quarter (six months, a year) to double-check their mental maps and key decisions made. By being proactive, they protect their business from themselves, or rather from the natural tendency to accumulate entropy in any closed system. As National Geographic continues, “A visual cue, however, can do wonders for resetting our navigation. If Souman allowed his blindfolded bumblers to lift their blindfolds for a minute out of every five or ten, they managed to recalibrate their sense of “straight ahead” and started each block of time in a straight line again”.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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