Think with your feet, see with your hands

I'm a runner, and so I've broken down over the years and spent time on the physical therapist's table.

Like the other day. After some treatment with heat and ultrasound, the PT turned me over to her rehab massage therapist, who pushed her two knife-edged hands into the side of my skin, closed her eyes, and moved the hands side-to-side.

After ten minutes, the PT walked back into the room, looked right at the massage therapist and asked: “what do you see?"

To ask a person with closed eyes what they see seemed a little strange to me. So I asked my PT about it later because I was curious. My PT said of the rehab massage therapist, “she's been doing this for over 25 years and by now she can see with her hands. She has a sort-of sonar to zero in on abnormal tissues.”

At one point I was enthralled with the series "Daredevil" on Netflix, and wrote an essay about how it might impact the way we view China and the US in the Pacific region. The series is about how a blind lawyer from a neighborhood in New York City learns martial arts (well, an extremely exaggerated version of martial arts) and fights crime. The show spent a lot of time on his ability to sense danger and proprioception—the body's ability to sense movement and location, like a gymnast sticking a landing.

I think we can use these other adjacent senses to our advantage…and yes, for strategy too.

Strategy is human, and so the body’s senses matter.

Start with the gut. Something that doesn't feel right, doesn't seem right, doesn't make sense. That's going to make you feel something in the pit of your stomach. You're going to push back against something like that. You're just not going to want to have anything to do with it. The phrase "trust your gut" exists for a reason.

Body language tells us so much. What you see, what you smell, can help you evaluate what's not being said. We know that so much of our lives are dominated by what isn't said—by the often unremarked-upon physical sum total of the engagement.

Feel. This one's a little more nuanced, but it's what you pick up on when you shake a hand. There's just something about that that's intuitive and built in to us.

Sound. You know how you know if there's something wrong just by the sound of someone's voice on the phone?

And think with your feet. We work and live in comfortable prisons, which box in our minds as well as our bodies. The best thing you can do to get a new idea, for strategy or otherwise, is to move. If you want to think out of the box, sometimes you have to walk to get there.

It’s been said that an army marches on its stomach, and if they’re lucky, they’re guided by strategists that think on their feet.