When a product is failing, the instinct is to call a meeting, gather data, and decide. But the philosopher Xunzi — the great Confucian contrarian of the 3rd century BCE — made a distinction that cuts through this reflex: he separated *knowing* from *acting* by insisting that clarity first requires a kind of deliberate stillness he called 'emptying.' Not passivity. Active clearing. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty arrived at something structurally identical two millennia later, arguing that we don't perceive situations neutrally — we perceive through the accumulated sedimentation of past habits, past frameworks, past successes. Those grooves feel like wisdom. Often they're just ruts. Together, these two thinkers suggest something useful for anyone steering a team: the real problem in a stuck product cycle is rarely missing information. It's that the person analyzing the situation is filtering it through a perceptual apparatus shaped by the last thing that worked. The practical move isn't more data. It's noticing which prior success is doing the filtering — and briefly setting it down.

What previous win are you most proud of — and is it the lens you're currently using to diagnose a problem that might actually be a different kind of problem entirely?

Drawing from Confucian Philosophy / Phenomenology — Xunzi (Xunzi, c. 3rd century BCE) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945)