Another vacation-inspired post, that I’ll put here for now - it was intended as a blog post, but I’m never sure how tolerable frequent posts are… Plus, of course, writing a post based on a 16th-century French philosopher could come across as a little niche…

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Essaying Ideas: Why Optionality Beats the Single Story

I’m looking at a page of an open book - I tend to have 2 or 3 open at a time... The Montaigne one already will be a finisher…

The paragraph that stopped me reads:

“…a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corn-cob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne’s day, but essais did not. Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One seventeenth-century Montaigneist defined it as firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight. On the whole, Montaigne discovered that the pistol shot all over the place and the horse galloped out of control, but this did not bother him. He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.”

That last line hit: He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.

We don’t write like that anymore (present evidence to the contrary). Or think like that. Especially not in pharma, biotech, or the broader world of ideas.

Today we write (and pitch, and plan, and publish) the other thing: the polished discourse with the boring introduction and the facile conclusion already baked in. One clean story. One tight thesis. One Target Product Profile. One narrative deck. One version of reality, defended to the death.

Montaigne would have found the whole performance ridiculous. He called his pieces essais - trials, experiments, attempts - precisely because he refused to pretend he had it all figured out before he started. He fired the pistol just to watch the smoke. He let the horse bolt. And then he wrote down what actually happened.

What if we brought a little more of that spirit into idea work - especially the high-stakes, high-uncertainty kind we do in pharmaceutical innovation?

The Tyranny of the Single Story

Let’s be honest. The single story is seductive. Investors love it. Regulators expect it. Boards reward it. “Here is our plan. Here is the data that supports it. Here is the five-year trajectory. Questions?”

It feels professional. It feels serious. It signals competence: we have done the homework, we have eliminated the variables, we know where we are going.

But it also does violence to reality.

Biology doesn’t read our Target Product Profiles. Markets don’t obey our slide decks. Competitors don’t wait politely while we execute our linear plan. Most of all, data - the real, messy, surprising data - has a habit of showing up late and saying something we never anticipated.

When that happens, the single-story mindset forces us into one of two bad options: (1) pretend the new data doesn’t matter and double down anyway, or (2) abandon the entire effort and start over from zero, having wasted years and hundreds of millions.

Montaigne would have laughed at both. He kept the pistol loaded and the horse saddled precisely because he expected the unexpected. The delight was in the deviation.

In pharma we see the cost of the single story everywhere. How many programs die in Phase II because the one indication we bet on didn’t pan out - while a different patient population or a subtle mechanistic signal was sitting right there, ignored? How many “failed” assets get shelved when, with a little Montaignean curiosity, they might have become the next serendipitous blockbuster?

We have built entire institutions around the illusion of predictability. We write 200-page clinical development plans before we have even dosed the first patient. We lock in assumptions in the Target Product Profile before the biology has had its say. We rehearse the narrative so thoroughly that any fork in the road starts to feel like a threat instead of an opportunity.

No wonder so much innovation feels stifled. We have mistaken certainty for progress.

Optionality as Intellectual (and Commercial) Practice

What Montaigne practiced - and what I’m increasingly convinced we need more of, as you’ll know by now - is optionality as a deliberate way of thinking.

Optionality isn’t indecision. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t “keeping your options open” in the vague, hand-wavy sense. It is the disciplined, joyful practice of maintaining multiple live paths until the data tells you which one is worth riding to the end.

It is firing several pistols at once and watching which ones shoot straight - and which ones, delightfully, do not.

In my own work, I’ve started experimenting with this, even before reading this new book. Instead of writing one definitive post or strategy deck, I sometimes write three short versions of the same idea:

• Version A: the optimistic take

• Version B: the skeptical take

• Version C: the weird middle that feels truest today but might embarrass me tomorrow

I let them sit next to each other without forcing reconciliation. Sometimes the tension between them is where the real insight lives. Sometimes one version quietly dies and another gallops off in an unexpected direction. The point is not to arrive at the single correct story. The point is to stay in motion, to keep tasting, to keep trying. My best, most creative, positioning ideas have typically been the ones that are there after a night’s sleep…

This is harder than it sounds. Our entire reward system - promotions, funding, regulatory approval, media coverage - punishes the appearance of uncertainty. But the universe punishes the illusion of certainty even more harshly.

The companies that are quietly pulling ahead in biotech right now aren’t the ones with the most polished single narrative. They are the ones treating early development as an option-generation engine. They run small, cheap bets in parallel. They design programs that can pivot gracefully when a biomarker lights up in an unexpected subpopulation, or when an off-target effect turns out to be the real gold. They keep the “If…” alive long enough for the data, the ‘then’, to speak.

That is Montaigne in modern dress.

How to Practice Montaignean Optionality (Without Getting Fired)

You don’t have to burn your TPP or abandon all planning. You just have to loosen the reins a little.

Here are a few practical moves I’ve been trying:

1. The Triple Draft – For any important idea or strategy, write the optimistic version, the pessimistic version, and the “messy middle” version. Share all three internally or even publicly. Let the tension do the work.

2. Public Experiments – Instead of “Here is my fully formed thesis,” post “I’m running this experiment for 30 days. Here is the live notebook.” The Substack format is perfect for this. Readers become fellow riders on the horse (I hope you will take advantage…)

3. The Fork Garden – When an idea branches, don’t prune immediately. Keep a short “fork garden” document of the paths not taken. Revisit it every quarter. Some of those forks will suddenly look like highways when the data changes.

4. End with Questions, Not Conclusions – Montaigne rarely wrapped things up neatly. He often ended mid-thought, inviting the reader to continue the essai themselves. Try it. Your last paragraph can be the beginning of someone else’s.

None of this feels “professional” at first. It feels risky. But the risk of the alternative - locking in too early and watching biology laugh at your plan—is far greater.

Tying It Back to Thenning, Then Iffing

This Montaignean spirit is not a rejection of rigour. It is a deeper, more honest form of it.

It connects directly to the philosophy I explored in a recent post here: “Does the Then come before the If…?”

There I argued for thenning first: starting with multiple desired thens (plural ends, multiple plausible Target Product Profiles) rather than a single tidy outcome. Then - and only then - iffing: back-engineering the conditions, experiments, and adaptive paths that keep those thens reachable.

That is exactly what Montaigne was doing in his square tower. He didn’t begin with a thesis he needed to prove. He began with a question, or an observation, or a feeling - and then let the ifs unfold wherever they led. He designed his thinking for optionality. He kept the ellipsis alive…

“If the pistol shoots straight… then we have one kind of essay. If the horse gallops out of control… then we have a much more interesting one.”

The delight, for Montaigne, was in staying open to whichever then the world actually delivered.

We can do the same in pharma. We can design programmes, portfolios, and even public writing with multiple thens in mind. We can treat early data as an invitation to essai rather than a threat to the narrative. We can choose the unpredictable over the pre-packaged - and be delighted when it comes out that way.

Because in the end, the horse almost always gallops out of control. The pistol rarely shoots exactly straight.

The question is whether we will yank the reins in panic… or loosen them, smile, and write down what happens next. I wonder if we could all…