Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

Stop treating outliers as noise, they're your biggest signal

15 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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Outliers aren't noise, they're signals. Traditional consulting teaches you to ignore anomalies, but in complex systems they carry the most informative insight. Deliberately surfacing and examining what doesn't fit existing narratives is how you actually understand what's happening.

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So broadening our gaze, scanning widely, and particularly noticing things that don't fit the story that we already have. So in complexity, we wanna look for outliers. In a complicated world, outliers are noise. That's what I was taught in my consulting career. Don't pay attention to the outliers. But the paradoxical thing in complexity is that the outliers matter a lot. And so training ourselves and being in practices that help us pay attention to the outliers is really crucial in complexity.