The idea that management is a hard science, which MBA programs have promoted for the past six decades, has become even more entrenched in the era of big data. But a scientific approach has its limits, say Martin, the coauthor of the best-seller "Playing to Win," and consultant Golsby-Smith. In fact, overreliance on scientific analysis tends to narrow strategic options and shut down innovation. That's because it's designed to understand natural phenomena that cannot be changed. It's not an effective way to evaluate possibilities--things that do not yet exist. The two authors offer an alternative approach to strategy making and innovation that relies on imagination, experimentation, and communication. To make decisions about what could be, managers should devise narratives about possible futures, using the storytelling tools first proposed by Aristotle (who ironically also originated the scientific method). If executives then hypothesize what would have to be true for those narratives to happen and validate their hypotheses through prototyping, they can determine which narrative has the most compelling chance of success.

The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle, says the author, and this ranks as one of the worst investment decisions we ever made. The thinking system we invested in was Aristotle's 'analytics', which monopolizes what most people characterize as 'thinking.' As a result, our thinking processes remain dominated by the culture of the sciences, and traditional approaches to strategy sit squarely at the table of logic and Science. But Aristotle actually conceived of two thinking systems, not one: he also conceived an entirely different thinking pathway that combined invention, judgment and decision wrapped up in a social process of debate. He called this process 'rhetoric', which the author calls 'design thinking' -- the Second Road to truth. The critical difference between the two roads is best understood by the different domains they address: analytics is the road by which we diagnose what already exists; rhetoric is the road by which we design alternative futures.