“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.”

The point to me (in the case of MY thinking this morning) is that we so easily get bogged down or outright tripped up by the “facts” that are right in front of our face (such as “37% of the customers in the restaurant buy wine”) but as you well describe it, we don’t understand the “why’s” or causality associated with the known, obvious fact. Without understand the why’s, there’s no chance of improving on it (e.g., raising that percentage to 45%) and no chance we’ll see a change in the causal/driving factor, thus we get blindsided and left clueless when it “mysteriously” plummets to 18% and we suddenly have an overstocked wine inventory to pay for! Thus we say “It’s the economy.” Who knows, perhaps it was actually that article in the paper last week that told how local law enforcement was about to start policing the downtown area more heavily in the evenings in order to crack down on DUI drivers??? Funny, we could have asked a frequent patron WHY he’s suddenly not ordering wine with his dinner in the evenings. But that would involve getting close to the customer. Heaven forbid!!!