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Late 2007
April 21, 2013
April 6, 2023
Peter Schwartz "The Art of the Long View" (1991)
I am reading a business planning book!
Voluntarily! Wow.
Peter Schwartz is a cohort of Stewart Brand,
and one of the folks associated with
"The Long Now Foundation". I picked this
up off of the table they put out at the
Long Now talks.
It's essentially about the virtues of
scenario planning -- presented in the In effect, the message
style favored by biz books, which one is that in the absence
might both praise and condemn as "simple". of any rigorous planning
methodology, we need
It is, at least, Not Dumb, and I'll have to tell ourselves
more to say on this, I expect. stories about the
future -- with the
emphasis on telling
*many* stories, covering
different possibilities.
At a minimum, he suggests
laying out three:
optimistic, pessimistic
and inbetween.
That may seem like a very
slight insight, but I
think it immediately
breaks through a very
common block that people
have: they always want
to find out what's
Realizing that it's okay not to know Right, and end up stuck
the right answer, learning to focus on with a single vision
the flexibility to deal with different centered on one guess.
circumstances...
This often seems to me like the And it's not all
critical thing-- to get comfortable that unusual to
with uncertainty, to learn to hold find people
multiple views in your head at once, ploughing ahead
even when they contradict each other. when there isn't
And without letting it all descend a single positive
into a mush where anything might be outcome they can
believed. imagine.
Other mentions here:
NARRATIVE_DRIVE
KNOWN_QUANTITIES
SCALING_SIMILARITY
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