For as long as I can remember — and certainly long before I had the term for it — I’ve believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks — knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas — that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something new. This is a marvelous idea, as Maria Popova riffs on Albert Einsteins concept of combinatorial play as the foundation for creative thought. But this isnt an idea of abstract interest. It is of incredible importance to strategists faced with dynamic, unforeseen, and unpredictable environments. If theory and education are not to provide a positive doctrine (Clausewitz was more than right in this regard) and if disparate models are each in some sense incomplete while providing a variety of insights (see Allison and Zelikow, for example), what are they for? Perhaps to provide first intellectual discipline and then to provide the cross-disciplinary building blocks that allow us to adapt to and creatively influence the world around us ... an engagement at the heart of strategy.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:50:08 +0000
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