This week in The Legibility Letter:
• Lime juice: 1875, the Royal Navy sailed for the Arctic believing it was protected — it had swapped lemons for cheaper limes that passed the acidity test with a quarter of the vitamin C (what you can’t explain, you can’t protect)
• From the inside: three years ago I went into AI without a clear plan — I didn’t fix a destination, I chose a river (directionality reveals paths you can’t see from the bank)
• A quote we like: Tyson had it right — every plan holds until the first punch (nobody wins on the plan they made, they win on how they respond when it blows up)
Lime juice
In 1875 a Royal Navy expedition to the Arctic turned back more than six hundred kilometres short of the Pole. Of 122 men, 60 had scurvy. They had lime juice aboard.
The Navy had cured scurvy eighty years earlier.
In 1747 a surgeon called James Lind ran what was probably the first clinical trial in history: twelve sailors with scurvy, six remedies, two men per remedy. Only the two who ate oranges and lemons recovered.
The Navy took forty-eight years to act on it. In 1795 it began issuing lemon juice daily, and scurvy all but vanished from the fleet.
Nobody knew why it worked. Vitamin C wasn’t isolated until 1932. But it worked, and for sixty years that was enough.
The change of supplier
Around 1860 the Navy swapped the Mediterranean lemon for the West Indian lime. It was cheaper and it grew in British colonies. And it passed quality control better than the lemon, because the test measured acidity, and limes are more acidic.
A lime has about a quarter of the vitamin C of a lemon. The juice was also stored in open tanks and run through copper piping, which destroyed most of what was left.
From then on the Navy sailed unprotected and didn’t know it. Scurvy came back on the long voyages. There was an inquiry by Parliament and another by the Admiralty. They examined the juice, the supply, the manufacture, the storage and the copper. Neither discovered that the fruit had changed.
And the doctors drew the logical conclusion: that citrus had never worked.
What you can’t explain, you can’t protect.
Your three lemon juices
Most businesses have three things that work without anyone knowing why.
The conversion rate that has been good for years and that nobody has taken apart to see what holds it up.
The salesperson who closes twice what anyone else does, with a method that exists only in his head.
The happy customers who, if you asked what the one thing they really like is, you couldn’t name.
All three are load-bearing. And all three are one change of supplier, one resignation or one cost saving away from stopping without anyone knowing why.
If something holds the business up, works, and you can’t explain it, the reasonable state isn’t calm. It’s discomfort.
The trap
The Navy wasn’t careless. The lime was cheaper, it was British, and it passed the test. The change looked harmless precisely because they had a test, and the test measured what they believed mattered.
That’s the price of not knowing why something works. It isn’t only that you might break it. It’s that when it breaks you don’t know what to look at, and you end up concluding it never worked.
Write down the three things in your business that work and that you can’t explain. Beside each one, what you’d look at first if it stopped tomorrow.
If the answer beside any of them is “I don’t know”, that’s the one someone is going to swap for a cheaper version.
Directionality
Almost three years ago I made a decision with no clear plan behind it. I decided we needed to be in the artificial intelligence space. I could see that AI would probably disrupt our consulting model, and that to stay ahead of the curve we needed to be inside that space rather than watching it from outside.
I didn’t know exactly what we’d do there. No product plan, no detailed roadmap. What I had was a reading of the direction the world was moving in, and the conviction that being in that river mattered more than knowing exactly where it would take us.
What has grown out of that decision is something I could never have predicted. We went from using AI inside the business to building our own AI products and selling them to clients: a publishing imprint, software, a platform with agents. None of it existed in my mind when I made the original decision. All of it emerged from being in the right space, exposed to the opportunities that space generates.
I’ve always been fascinated by this idea: directionality. You don’t really need to predict the future. You need to put yourself in the right river and let the current do the rest.
That isn’t passivity. Getting into the river took an active decision and an investment of time, money and attention. But once we were in, the opportunities that appeared weren’t ones I designed. They emerged, because we were in the right place, paying the right kind of attention. The river brought them.
I see the same thing outside business. Someone who joins a club to get fit will almost certainly collect benefits they never planned: better health, but also new friendships, more energy, more confidence, ideas that turn up in a conversation after training. None of that was in the original goal. All of it came from being in the right space.
And it has made me question something most people take for granted: goals as a process.
A goal fixes a destination. And in fixing it, it also fixes what you can see. You get efficient at chasing one specific thing and blind to everything that wasn’t in the plan. The emergent opportunities, the ones you couldn’t have designed, the ones that only appear once you’re in the river, fall outside your field of view because they don’t fit the roadmap.
Directionality works differently. It doesn’t fix a destination. It chooses a current. And the current reveals paths you could never have seen from the bank. It’s more generous than a goal, because it trusts that being in the right space will produce results you couldn’t have planned, and often those results are better than anything you’d have designed on your own.
I’m not saying goals are useless. They have their place. But I’ve learned that directionality is far closer to how nature actually works. A seed doesn’t plan which way to grow. It grows towards the light, and the path reveals itself as it goes.
Three years ago I couldn’t see what we have today. But I chose the right river. And the river did what rivers do.
You don’t need to predict the future. You need to choose the right river.
Edward
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
— Mike Tyson
I love this quote, partly because I love boxing, but also because it describes entrepreneurship better than most strategy books.
The plan is perfect until reality hits it.
Before launch, everything adds up. The market will respond, the numbers make sense, the strategy is sound.
On paper nobody loses. But the market hits, and it hits where you weren’t expecting.
The customer doesn’t want what you swore they’d want, the channel you were going to own doesn’t convert, the competitor reacts differently from the forecast.
And that’s where people separate. Not by who had the better plan, but by who’s still thinking clearly after the first punch.
I’ve had immaculate plans dismantled in the first week of contact with reality. And I’ve stepped into the ring with technique that was perfect on the bag and came apart in the first round.
Both times, at first, I froze and defended the plan. It took me a while to accept that the plan was never the goal. It was only an opening hypothesis.
Which is why the ability to recover is worth more than the ability to plan. The plan gets you into the ring. Taking the punch and carrying on is what decides the fight.
Nobody wins on the plan they made. They win on how they respond when the plan blows up.