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Keely's avatar

I wonder if anyone else recognizes this as an ode to the neurodivergent strategist - there’s so many kickass strategists, especially women, who’ve realized over the last several years that their strategic superpowers (and! some of the things they spent too long apologizing for) were connected to one diagnosis or another that flew under the radar because (shocker) none of that was designed for them either.

Anyway, I see my audhd self in this and many others that fit the bill above and I applaud the shit out of it — obviously it goes way beyond that, but I wanted to call it out because I think it’s likely to be particularly resonant and so I wanted to say I see you too. The patterns! The deep diving! The willingness to go rogue! The intuition!

💛🌻✨

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Swag Valance's avatar

Comfort with the old methods is entirely dead. But I found it odd that everything itemized in your strategist's manifesto was passive and receptive, which is a major oversight.

Even tinkering with "new tools", such as AI, and extracting signals is still playing with old data. Old data is useful when the future is very much like the present. But guess what? That way of working is dying along with everything else. The more strategy remains observational and aloof, the more it will be a victim of the future. That's just driving a car looking through your rear-view mirror.

What's missing is the active piece. In complex adaptive systems, no one can simply surmise all the complexities and interactions of the system's mechanics by modeling it on old patterns and past data. The only way to truly understand how a system is working, and how it can be changed, is to intervene.

And by intervention, I don't mean "applying" observed patterns by strategically committing to leverage them in related domains. Fire and forget has no place in our future. This is much more "start with evolving hypotheses and learn as you go", committing to iterating on your hypotheses as you seek windows where you should commit more. This is analogous to what BCG Henderson Institute highlighted as "competing on the rate of learning" a few years ago.

Lots of experiments with tight, data-fed feedback loops to iterate and discover the adjacent possible. And a continuous process of reconciling the adjacent possible with desired direction. Note that I used direction and definitely NOT destination - because that kind of myopia closes perceptive minds off from novelty that will ultimately emerge during the process.

It's insufficient to leverage old data. You must create new data as part of the act.

Get out of the ivory tower and get your hands dirty. Strategy that isn't actively participating in the learning process, with tight learning loops, is dead strategy for a past that no longer exists.

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