The Art of Strategic Incompletion: Why Unfinished Thoughts Lead to Breakthrough Innovation.
By: Jan De Kesel
When Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class at Reed College, he had no idea how it would shape the future of personal computing. He was simply following his curiosity, collecting what seemed like an unrelated piece of knowledge. Years later, this “incomplete” pursuit became the foundation for the Macintosh’s revolutionary typography. This is a perfect illustration of his famous observation that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
In today’s business world, we’ve become obsessed with completion. Our screens overflow with to-do lists, our calendars burst with back-to-back meetings, and our productivity apps ping us constantly about tasks awaiting closure. We’ve created a culture that celebrates the checked box and the cleared inbox. But what if this obsession with completion is actually holding us back from our most innovative thinking?
Consider Thomas Edison’s journey to inventing the light bulb. His notebooks reveal thousands of “incomplete” ideas, failed experiments, and partial insights. These weren’t failures — they were essential steps in the innovation process. Each incomplete thought built upon the others, creating a rich tapestry of possibilities that eventually led to breakthrough.
This is the essence of strategic incompletion: the art of keeping multiple threads of thought alive and allowing them to weave together naturally over time. It’s not about procrastination or leaving things unfinished out of negligence. Instead, it’s about recognizing that our best thinking often emerges from the interplay of multiple, developing ideas.
Think about how our minds naturally work. When was the last time you had a breakthrough insight? Chances are it didn’t come while powering through your to-do list. More likely, it emerged unexpectedly — perhaps during a shower, a walk, or while working on something entirely unrelated. This is because our brains excel at making connections between ideas when we give them space to breathe.
Thomas, a software entrepreneur I recently spoke with, discovered this principle by accident. “I used to beat myself up about having too many unfinished projects,” he shared. “But then I noticed that my best innovations came from unexpected connections between these different initiatives. What seemed like lack of focus was actually my brain gathering pieces for future breakthroughs.”
The business world is finally catching up to this reality. Companies like Google and 3M have long understood the value of allowing ideas to percolate, giving employees dedicated time for exploration without immediate pressure for completion. They recognize that innovation rarely follows a linear path.
But embracing strategic incompletion requires more than just permission to explore. It needs a fundamental shift in how we think about productivity and progress. Traditional productivity metrics, tasks completed, items checked off — actually work against our natural cognitive processes. They push us toward premature closure and prevent us from seeing valuable connections.
Consider how different fields cross-pollinate in modern innovation. Tesla’s advances in battery technology influence home energy storage. Machine learning algorithms developed for games find applications in medical diagnosis. These breakthroughs happen because someone maintained multiple incomplete threads of knowledge long enough for surprising connections to emerge.
The psychological benefits of this approach are profound. When we stop fighting our brain’s natural tendency to explore multiple paths, we experience less stress and more creativity. We free ourselves from the tyranny of the to-do list and create space for genuine innovation.
A friend of mine who is a management consultant, describes the transformation: “When I stopped trying to force every project to immediate completion, I actually started getting better results. Ideas had time to mature. Solutions emerged more naturally. And surprisingly, I felt more productive, not less.”
This isn’t about working less or letting things slide. It’s about working smarter by aligning with our natural cognitive processes. It’s about maintaining a rich ecosystem of ideas and allowing connections to emerge organically. It’s about trusting that not everything needs immediate closure to be valuable.
The future belongs to those who can maintain multiple threads of thought, who can see patterns emerging across seemingly unrelated domains, who can trust the process of natural connection. In a world of increasing complexity, the ability to hold space for incomplete thoughts isn’t just helpful — it’s essential.
The question isn’t “How can we complete more?” but rather “How can we create the conditions for our best thinking to emerge?” The answer lies in embracing strategic incompletion as a productive force in our work and lives. The dots will connect, but only if we give them space to find their way to each other.
But this raises a practical question: How do we manage this approach in a world that still demands results? How do we keep track of all these developing threads without losing our way? The answer lies in having the right tools and systems, but that’s a story for another article.
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I like where you are going. Happy to follow along.