Ever been to a store where they asked you to fill out a questionaire before they would show you some products? If you shop online I'm sure you have - but it would never happen in the physical world, because a sales rep understands that the concrete always wins. This basic observation seems to be what this post is about.

This is related to a previous post on how people search. You don't start by defining a strategy for your search, you just look at the first thing you can get your eyes on and test 'is this it?'. Only when that fails do you try to establish context and refine your search from there. Concrete always wins. Ideas and concepts are only there to help us when thinking concretely fails.

Incidentally, that's why Google was such a revelation, because all of a sudden concrete thinking worked for web search. Previously you just knew that you would need a strategy to succeed in a search, using plenty of expert options to rule out bad matches, or alternatively spend a lot of time poring over the first 20 results pages (which by the way is a strategy in itself - known as 'brute force')