Where Data and Dreams Collide, by Ron Crossland
Factoid Junkie and Poet
In 1967, when the network cancelled the original Star Trek television series, I protested mightily by hauling out an old Remington Rand typewriter--my father was a typewriter repairman--and pounding out a poorly-constructed, emotionally-stinging barb to the Amarillo Daily in Texas. The letter, which excoriated the producers for their lack of foresight, was actually published, thereby documenting my prescience at a mere 15 years of age. I felt like Thomas Paine, though my arguments were a bit less developed than those in ol’ Tom’s Common Sense.
This adolescent memory illustrates a point concerning the distinction between strategy and vision—two ideas that are understood to be different, yet are often casually substituted for each other. I use here another Trekkie-related anecdote to exemplify the distinction. Not long ago, I’d placed an order for the Kindle, the new eBook reader by Amazon. Even though eBook readers are not new--the idea of an electronic book is at least as old as Star Trek and likely very much older--the idea of a world in which all information can be accessed by anyone, anywhere is very much like vision, an imagining of a rich world far different than our own. Strategy then is the fun, difficult, exhilarating, and tortuous path to arrive at this vision. Kindle is simply the newest step in this journey from the visionary ideas of Star Trek to the commonplace gadgets of today.
Since imagining the future is considered so much easier than actually figuring out exactly how to get there, we have spent a great deal of effort in developing strategic-thinking skills. In the May 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, Grosberg, McLean, and Nohria showcased their analysis on strategic skills, which they claim are the most transportable among today’s peripatetic executives who leap from one business venture to another. This is likely because these skills are so valued and because we work so danged hard at coming up with them
As far back as the early 1980s, the venerable strategy theorist Kenchii Ohmae had written in his Mind of the Strategist:
“In what I call the mind of the strategist, insight and a consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational. Strategists do not reject analysis. Indeed they can hardly do without it. But they use it only to stimulate the creative process, to test the ideas that emerge, to work out their strategic implications, or to ensure successful execution of high-potential ‘wild’ ideas that might otherwise never be implemented properly. Great strategies, like great works of art or great scientific discoveries, call for technical mastery in the working out but originate in insights that are beyond the reach of conscious analysis."
What stimulates me about this passage is that Ohmae holds that intuitive, creative, and analogical processes guide the mind of the strategist. While data analysis aids the strategist, it cannot substitute for the more intuitive process. Some might see Ohmae’s mind of the strategist as being more like the mind of a visionary.
In his insightful Educating Intuition, Robin Hogarth, who teaches at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Bilboa, Spain, sees computers as being far better with number crunching than they are with analogical, intuitive reasoning processes. Computers, for all their muscle, still cannot discern which data to pursue nor can they imagine new worlds. Our increasingly wonderful algorithms are helping computers to sort data, slice it and dice it and synthesize information in new and powerful ways. What’s needed is the link, those intuitive interfaces for our gadgets. Even though my new Kindle supposedly has one, an intuitive interface, computers as a whole are far from possessing even the most rudimentary intuitive capabilities of humans. Hogarth points out that “Analogies aid the reasoning process; they help us make sense of the world. The power of analogical thinking lies in the fact that it is inherently intuitive."
All of which leads us to the power of story, metaphor and analogy. Reasoning from analogies or stories about the future is an intuitive process in the mind of the strategist. We can imagine a world that data cannot prove. If we couldn’t, how could we conceive goals, outcomes or dreams that lift us out of what John W. Gardner termed the “petty preoccupations” of our daily life? I’m suggesting that the key lies with intuition, a process that facilitates the fluid movement between vision and strategy. This is the place where data and dreams collide to help us imagine new worlds and new paths to reach them.
Since we have done so well at developing strategic skills, we should now begin the harder and messier task of developing greater intuition. The strategic thinking community agrees. In a speech delivered at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business in March, 2005, John Sterman, an M.I.T. professor of strategic thinking, advised business students to augment their strategic thinking acumen by acquiring greater technical skills. But more important, he emphasized, was the need to focus on other valuable leadership assets such as dialogue, empathy, self-reflection and the ability to access greater reservoirs of analogous reasoning. The same reasoning, I might add, that I had at 15 and was future-tripping, star-gazing at Star Trek. Now that was real vision.
Back to Top