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Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement Page 9 (23 of 208)
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9
Flash versus Blink
make quick decisions like Klein’s fi ghters, yet you seldom refi
think about strategy. Instead you master your fi eld as an expert,
and then you get creative. That’s where strategic intuition comes
in. Creative ideas in a professional fi eld—even the arts—arise the
same way they do in science. This contrasts sharply with brain-
storming, where you rely on pure imagination. But the scientifi c
method depends not on imagination but on discovery, through
strategic intuition. You do not imagine the unknown. You dis-
cover it and make it known. And it turns out to be different from
what you imagined.
Our last fi eld is education. This book presents strategic intuition
as its own discipline, but each fi eld of knowledge should teach its
own version in its regular course of instruction. Lawyers should
learn strategic intuition for lawyers, doctors for doctors, artists
for artists, and so on. And shouldn’t you start in grade school? A
century ago John Dewey launched a progressive education move-
ment that claims to impart creative thinking skills beyond the tra-
ditional disciplines. And in graduate education the Harvard case
method follows this progressive tradition. Yet a closer look at this
tradition shows that it misses a key element that makes fl ashes of
insight possible: examples from history to put on the shelves of
your brain and combine. Methods that teach such examples offer
a better education for strategic intuition.
Before you turn the page and look through the fi rst window
of the cottage, I’d like to give a warning. As you see how great
achievements really happen, your fi rst reaction might be disap-
pointment. It’s like what happens to the audience at a magic
show when someone pulls back the curtain to reveal the magi-
cian’s tricks. It pricks our balloon. The mystery is gone. If that’s
what Bill Gates did—or Picasso or Einstein—then what’s the big
deal? But like that same audience, instead we might start to think:
if that’s how it works, with enough practice we can do it too. And
that’s exactly the point. I hope these examples inspire you in that
way. Strategic intuition puts leaps of human achievement within
the grasp of all human beings—of people like you.
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