summarize, the four X-factors provide a guiding message for strategic thinking. You should emphasize:
• Drive instead of complacency
• Insight instead of intuition
• Chance instead of certainty
• Emergence instead of master planning
Closing Thoughts: Historical Thinking and the Future
You can identify a strategic-thinking narrative for any historical person or event and find useful lessons within that narrative. There are conventional accounts of what happened and why, but there are insights to be gathered from reexamining evidence to craft alternative narratives of cause and effect.
A strategic thinker appreciates the value of historical thinking.
This pattern is characteristic of a strategic-thinking narrative: a curious individual scans the world around her for interesting signals. As part of the scanning, she evaluates her existing resources and emerging technology for underappreciated potential. Eventually she realizes a big idea and an insight. She experiments and organizes her resources to improve the fit of her resources to the situation.
Let’s imagine that we could time-transport Christopher Columbus from the 15th century into the contemporary milieu with his X-factor of drive intact. Would he be successful? This conjecture might help us understand factors that are relevant to our situation. Context influences the answer. Moreover, it raises more questions: Would he have acquired a different knowledge of technologies that are cutting edge for our times (for example, advanced materials, mapping, management, navigation, and artificial intelligence)? What is the nature of his network with other innovators?
The four pillars and four X-factors of strategic thinking provide a useful model for speculating about individuals in situations that call for good strategy. The exercise offers a lens for identifying plausible new states of the world and actions to advance our interests. We can’t predict what would happen to Columbus in the modern day, but we can identify some forces that might shape the search for opportunity.
The blue oceans of opportunity today are not the same as in Columbus’s time. The technologies are different. But the Columbuses of today are just as curious, observant, and thoughtful.
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