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Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement Page 5 (19 of 208)
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5
Flash versus Blink
a good idea, not a bad one. But no one can predict what that fl ash
of insight will be. The individual human mind always stands at
the center of how great achievements happen.
Although the discipline of strategic intuition rightly belongs in
the fi eld of strategy, it brings together elements from other dis-
ciplines as well. That is because it deals above all with concrete
reality, not abstract theory. Scholarly fi elds arise as attempts by
human beings to organize knowledge about the world in ways
that other humans can understand. They are never full and true
pictures of the world itself. That’s why Einstein drew on many
fi elds for his theory of relativity, and Marie Curie won the Nobel
Prize twice, in chemistry and physics. And so on through history,
to Bill Gates, the Google guys, and beyond. Scholarly disciplines
are excellent ways to organize knowledge, but don’t mistake them
for the real world.
This book presents each discipline in turn, for what it can con-
tribute to our understanding of strategic intuition. That makes
the book eclectic in the extreme. The fi rst half of the book covers
fi elds that help explain how fl ashes of insight work ve scholarly fi
in theory: the history of science, neuroscience, cognitive psychol-
ogy, military strategy, and Asian philosophy. The second half cov-
ers four fi elds that apply strategic intuition in practice: business,
social enterprise, the professions, and education. In each case we
see how fl ashes of insight apply to the methods for action that
rule that fi eld.
In this way, strategic intuition becomes like a cottage you come
upon in the middle of a forest. You move up close, look around
the outside, and then peer through each window to see what’s
inside. Each window gives you a different view of the same thing.
You look in one window, then another, then another, and then at
the end you fi nd you’re inside the cottage. It all comes together in
your mind. You understand strategic intuition.
Our fi eld is the history of science. Many of rst scholarly fi
the world’s greatest achievements are scientifi c. For example, the
scientifi c revolution took us out of the Middle Ages and into the
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