A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

4,000 down on each of the horses, just to be certain.) Kadeesha was about to receive 13,000 pounds in cash. She shrieked for joy. “I’m debt free for the first time in eight years!”
Brown’s experiment tried to show how poorly most of us grasp basic concepts of probability. What he actually revealed was something he himself might not have realized. Kadeesha always had the upper hand, and she very likely sensed it. She had no way of knowing whether Brown’s so-called system was legitimate or not. She probably lacked a firm grounding in the science of probability. What she really needed to know, however, was not whether Brown’s system could find her the winning horse. Instead, she needed to know whether Derren Brown would permit her to lose her and her father’s savings on national TV.
Kadeesha had two ways of thinking about what Brown would likely do. She could have tried to ascertain Brown’s character, observing subtle cues to gauge his kindness and compassion—the underlying drivers that make him tick. The second method was for Kadeesha to contemplate the limits on what Brown could actually do, regardless of his inclinations. With this approach Kadeesha had to focus on Brown’s constraints. The key question then would be not whether Brown, of his own volition, would let her lose, but whether his television network or the British TV-viewing public would permit a working-class single mom to be ruined by a clever TV host.
Kadeesha may not have had the skills to think deeply about the probability of predicting races, but rather than being a sucker for “The System,” Kadeesha may have worked the system—the larger social system in which both Brown and Kadeesha have to function. MoonOver Miami had little chance of winning, but placing her money as Brown instructed her to do proved the shrewdest guess she could have made.
We will never know what Kadeesha really thought, but we can use her predicament to illuminate the kinds of questions leaders face when thinking like the enemy. Exactly like Kadeesha, leaders must seek out their adversaries’ underlying drivers and constraints. They must gather information, filter out the ocean of irrelevant data, and devise shortcuts for locating the points that matter most. I have called this exceedingly difficult endeavor strategic empathy.
Kadeesha’s story also highlights a related problem in prediction. Quantitative methods often miss the mark because they calculate the wrong data, as I described in the previous chapter. Even if Kadeesha had possessed training in statistics, math, or the science of probability, seeing through Brown’s system would have done her little good. Kadeesha walked away a winner: 13,000 pounds richer than before. Moon Over Miami’s fate never mattered. The only odds that counted were the ones on what Brown would do to her in the public eye. And those odds were probably always in her favor. Knowing which data matter most is what strategic empaths do best.
I began this book by asking what produces strategic empathy—the crucial yet all-too-rare capacity for divining an enemy’s underlying drivers and constraints. I have argued that when leaders focused on the right data—their enemy’s behavior at pattern-break moments—they improved their chances of reading their enemies correctly. When they ignored the pattern breaks entirely, or else grossly misinterpreted them as in Stalin’s case regarding Hitler, they thwarted their capacity for accurate assessments. I further argued that when leaders assumed that their opponents’ future behavior would resemble their past behavior, they hindered their own ability to identify and correctly interpret surprising new information, which could have afforded them useful insight.
Mahatma Gandhi’s recognition that the British leadership was not evil, as he frequently stated, but in fact remorseful over the Amritsar massacre emboldened him to pursue a strategy of aggressive nonviolence. He could do this in