Spoiler alert.
If you haven't read Silver Blaze — the Sherlock Holmes short story in which Holmes remarks on the now fabled curious incident of the dog in the night — the point is that the dog doesn't actually bark. Or do anything.
Holmes solves the case by allowing a train of reasoning to flow from curiosity about something that didn't happen, rather than from the raft of information his famous, rigorous, experience-based methodology had already collated.
If you had just spent three months writing a book about the mistakes businesses make in industries constrained by rules and consequences —a book that includes a chapter on the complementary need for MI and curiosity —and then started a series of blog posts about what Sherlock Holmes can teach us, and you didn't think of this one until number four...
Well.
Holmes's investigation of the Silver Blaze case was thorough. Footprints, physical evidence, witness accounts. Investigated based on the accumulated knowledge of how crimes of this type tend to unfold. The information his experience had taught him to look for. If you had asked him to write down everything he found, it would have been a long and detailed list.
The dog would not have appeared on it. The dog did nothing.
And that is precisely the point.
No MI system flags the absence of everything absent. No audit checklist includes every thing that could have happened and didn't. The list of absences is infinite — you cannot investigate what isn't there unless something makes you stop and notice it isn't there. And no amount of experience predicts that absence in all future circumstances.
What made Holmes stop was curiosity. Not a new piece of evidence. A question his experience made him capable of asking — and a culture of mind that allowed him to ask it. And the curiosity to allow a train of thought to become established.
The MI made the curiosity productive. Without his investigative process, his gathering of ‘the important information’ he wouldn't have noticed or become aware of a dog (that to all intents and purposes did nothing of consequence at any time in the story). What has the dog got to do with anything! But that information was only of value when allied with the curiosity to notice it did nothing, consider that perhaps this might be unusual, and be interested in what this might tell him, that allowed the case to be solved.
Audit and MI are backward-looking — they verify against assumptions and priorities you already decided mattered. Rigorous, essential, but built on what you already knew to ask. Curiosity is unstructured, follows answers wherever they lead, and works behind assumptions rather than reinforcing them — it's how you surface what your MI wasn't designed to find.
