College teaches you how to think. Working teaches you how to process. Entrepreneurship teaches you how think and process.
These verbs may have a similar implication, that is constant utility of brainpower, but they bear a different meaning when combined: strategic imagination.
I first heard this phrase from Umair Hague in a post called How Strategic Imagination Happens. At its core, strategic imagination enables you to “imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.” The idea, though, is to find a balance between imagination and behavior. As Umair states, “Strategic imagination is tremendously difficult because it requires us to put aside yesterday’s tired assumptions and orthodoxies, and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created. The surest, most lethal killer of strategic imagination is being reined in by orthodoxy: thinking that tomorrow must be like yesterday.”
Forgetting the past and focusing on the future is sometimes the most difficult task of one’s undergraduate career. Every class, every test and every paper serve as milestones of a learning path, built on tenets from every passing second. You tend to focus on the “now.” I noticed friends succumbing to academic orthodoxy. It wasn’t until Graduation Day that classmates began to appreciate freedom: vacation from scheduled classes, meetings and writing.
However, once the vacation ended and the work day began orthodoxy set-in once more. New graduates learned the value of process, tasking items as efficiently as possible. If they were lucky, they applied some thought before actionable tasks. (This is, to say, that where they work and what they work on is a “lethal killer of strategic imagination.”)
Now, if you applied strategic imagination while in college, or at work; you did the right thing. I fear college and corporate America is anesthetic toward breaking rules, making it more difficult to have “a profound appetite for revolution: a profound ability to let go of yesterday’s stale, tired, and thoroughly toxic orthodoxies - to explode the shrunken, stunted strategic imagination the industrial-era firm suffers from.”
May 20, 2008, 4:37pm
