When your product roadmap feels like it's collapsing under competing priorities, the instinct is to call a meeting, build a matrix, or produce a cleaner framework. But the 11th-century Persian philosopher Avicenna had a different diagnosis for this kind of paralysis: he called it a failure of *ittisal* — the moment of contact between the particular case in front of you and the universal principle that should govern it. His point wasn't that you need more information. It was that intellect and perception have to *touch* before judgment becomes possible, and most people short-circuit that contact by jumping straight to categorization. What this means practically: when a product decision feels murky, the problem is often that you've categorized it before you've truly perceived it. You've labeled it a 'resource conflict' or a 'stakeholder issue' and stopped seeing the specific texture of this situation. Avicenna's remedy — and what cognitive psychologist Gary Klein later confirmed in his research on naturalistic decision-making — is to slow down at the moment of naming. Notice what this situation actually looks like before deciding what kind of situation it is. The label forecloses the perception. Tuesday is a good day to pick one open decision and ask: what am I seeing, versus what category have I already dropped it into?

Name a current decision you've labeled — 'resourcing issue,' 'misaligned stakeholders,' anything — and strip the label off. What is the raw situation underneath, before the category?

Drawing from Islamic Neoplatonism / Naturalistic Decision Theory — Avicenna / Ibn Sina (Kitab al-Shifa, c. 1027) and Gary Klein (Sources of Power, 1998)