Only a short while ago, strategy and planning was king. Forecasting, and consistently anticipating smart bets, generally created the power sources within organizations. The future of a business (or a career) fit into an established framework or system that implied predictability and a significant extent of control: if managed well, success would follow. Today however, uncertainty is all around and very tangible. The business environment is in rapid transformation and has become ever more demanding, resulting in organizations and businesses having to radically rethink their business models, organizational structures, and management styles—simultaneously.
When we are faced with a challenge, our impulsive response is to overcome it by restoring order. We naturally look for ways to deduct logic, until we feel that we know what to do. Unfortunately, the rapid analysis and rational decision-making that most managers use to run their organizations has proven to be seriously limited. As problems and circumstances become more complex, the outcomes of our traditional analyses no longer sensibly refer to previous patterns or come up with feasible solutions.
Furthermore, technologies are developing at a dizzying pace. The ways in which information technologies are being deployed are changing increasingly rapidly, too. Meanwhile, we have reached the front of the next innovation wave that involves nano, neuro, and biotechnologies. All of these changes have affected our original views on the world and humanity, which now morph in unexpected ways and impact our view on the self and the institutions that construct our habitat.
In order to come to terms with the types of intensely complex, new challenges that we are faced with, we must gain as much insight into them as is realistically possible. THNK believes that this explicitly includes pointing out the aspects about which we lack knowledge, even embracing the unknown. Everyday analytical skills do not incorporate these things. This is why the true creative leadership that THNK will teach is required in today's world, to allow leaders to think strategically as well as creatively about how to adapt in order to meet new demands.
