Today's Need for Strategic Skills
Why do our members have such a passion for mastering strategy? Today's world wants you in a box, and too many people stay in that box all their lives. How do you get out? Sun Tzu's adaptive response strategy takes advantage of the way the world is changing. We live in an multi-dimensional age of discovery, but our education taught us how to follow orders, not make decisions. When people could plan on staying in the same job with the same company their whole lives, they didn't to think about their position every day. Adaptive thinking works much better in fast-changing environments. In school, you learned that logic was linear. Classical strategy retrains your mind to work in the networked, reiterative loop.
A Networked World Requires Rapid Responses
The industrial age was defined by hierarchical organizations and preplanned processes, which minimized individual decision-making. Our information age is defined by interconnected organizations and adaptive processes that demand constant decision-making. In this change, there have been three important shifts: 1) from order following to decision making, 2) from long-term planning to instant responses, and 3) from top-down command to outside-in adaptability. Read what the research says about the challenges of our dynamic world here.
Trapped In Linear Thinking
The is not the world for which we were trained. Our education system was design to teach us a "deterministic" world view that devalued decision-making. The success of deterministic planning in creating the industrial age made it the dominant world view. Our educational system was specifically designed to train us in this viewpoint. However, both as a philosophy and as a training method, the traditional linear paradigm does not address the decision-rich world we live in. Read more about how we were trapped in this deterministic worldview here.
More Information Creates More Problems
Time flows in a line in one direction, but information flows in many dimensions. The linear worldview cannot cope with the flood of information in today's world. Using linear thinking, we have to fight with this information: 1) to predict the future, 2) to create a complete picture, 3) to see other viewpoints, and 4) to make choices. Read more about the challenge of information here.
The Benefits and Skills of Adaptive Thinking
In our networked world, we must learn to act as decision-makers, taking command of our lives. We must make good choices every day. Sun Tzu's The Art of War teaches the adaptive methods that a commander needs. These skills focus on quickly recognizing situations (rapid cognition) and seeing your opportunities (recognition-based decision-making). Learn more about the benefits here.