By Rodney J. Johnson

Prescient Consulting

Got strategic vision? In your dreams.

It is hallowed tradition that every good discussion of strategy, philosophy, logic, or morality must include a chess analogy. There is no reason this article should be any different. After all, chess players are in a privileged position to teach us about strategy and strategic thinking.

One of the things that have attracted people through the centuries to chess was that the rules of the game, strategy, and tactics, are uniquely unmuddled. Strategy would seem to be a clear cut business for chess players since there is exactly zero chance, risk, or unknown in the game. With perfect vision the chess player can attain perfect insight and perfect foresight. With perfect vision of the board, the chess player can actually become god of all he surveys - exercising perfect control and execution. The chess player's fate is completely in his hands.

Unfortunately, the key words are with perfect vision. Even though the board is sitting right in front of our eyes, for most, it might as well be covered with a steel box. So opaque are the realities of the strategic situation we are faced with. So obscure are the roads we should take to deal with it. Why is this? In essence, the situation is too complex to deal with. Even without chance, there are simply too many issues to face to make a good decision. The numbers of possibilities we are confronted with are too large for our eyes, and our brains, to deal with.

A quick look at the kinds of numbers involved gives us a sense of the magnitude of our task. There are 64 squares on the board. While this doesn't seem like a lot, if we were to put one checker on the first square, two on the second, and four on the third, doubling the checkers all the way to the 64th square, we would have 2 to the 64th power checkers by the last square. If we assume these checkers are a half-inch thick, we would have enough of these checkers to reach the edge of the solar system more than 40,000 times. And that is just the squares, what about all the potential moves? Mathematicians tell us there are more possible moves in a game of chess than atoms in the universe.

Business, with all of its risk and chance must be still more complicated. Business has so many more dimensions. It involves grasping amorphous ideas rather than clear-cut rules, building coalitions with 'buy in' rather than imposing strict control. It involves managing rather than solving. In the business world, surety is a luxury no one ever enjoys. Yet, just as there are those people who do play chess extremely well there are also people who seem to never make a bad move in business. Are these people human computers calculating every possible move and countermove all the way forward into the future? The press calls them geniuses, visionaries, and prophets, but are they really? How is it that they are able to make good decisions time and time again? Do they know something we don't?

Imagine Where You Want To Be and It Will Be So.

Actually, they do. Good chess players and good business strategists know that complexity can be greatly reduced by maximizing the usage of what human brains are good at - creativity and imagination. Humans aren't good at dealing with extreme complexity, so good strategists learn to circumvent it. Humans aren't skilled at calculating move and countermove ad infinitum, so good strategists find ways not to do it. Good strategists don't deal with all those possibilities and hope they can figure out where it will all end. They can't figure it out. No one is that smart.

Instead, good strategists fast forward the tape and skip to the end. The thing they know that most do not is the power of dreaming. Dreaming is about cutting through, in fact completely ignoring, all the complexity of the current reality to envision an end situation that is exactly what you would wish it to be. That end situation is called the Dream Position. The Dream Position is the place at the end of the story where everything would end up if you could have your way completely. The Dream Position has no constraints, no limiting factors, and bears little relationship to the present. It is as if the chess player had taken his hand and swept all the pieces onto the floor, only to replace them on the board exactly where he wishes them. The Dream Position is unbridled imagination - the strategist imagines what he wishes the end of the game to look like. He imagines, without limitation, where he wishes his business could be at some future point. That's step one.

Step two - don't panic.

The good strategist doesn't worry about how he is going to get there from here. That's putting himself back into the midst of the complexity again. Rather, he worries about how he is going to get here from there. He works backwards, and in the process avoids everything not in his dream. He avoids all the needless complexities and infinite possibilities he can't handle anyway. As he is working backwards he will eventually arrive at either a dead end, which is a position that is not achievable, or at his current situation. If he arrives at a dead end, that means that his Dream Position is unreachable. The good strategist must then do the most difficult thing of all. He must give up that dream. If the Dream Position is unreachable from where he is, no amount of wishing will help him reach it. In fact, no amount of calculation will, either. The dream must be considered dead and a new one found. He must continue to search for these positions and analyze them until he arrives at one that has no dead ends and is completely reachable. Now he knows, with confidence, that if he follows path A, he will arrive at destination A. Somehow, he has plotted a concrete path through a virtually infinite number of possible roads, and he has done it in a uniquely human way - with imagination.

He must do the same for those who would do harm to his plans. He must imagine their dream positions and attempt to understand which ones are achievable and which are not for he will have to fend off the dreams of others while achieving his own. And he must do this as a regular exercise to ensure nothing has changed. At each step of the way, he must reevaluate the Dream Position to make sure it is still locked in to radar.

The strategist we have been describing undoubtedly has great vision. At some point in the glorious future he will be said to have been prescient (sorry, couldn't avoid it). And in reality he did possess amazing foresight, but not because he saw what the outcome of his current activities was going to be. Rather, he 'chose' the future and saw what current steps were mandated today for achieving that future vision. He solved the problem of immense complexity and endless possibilities in a very human way - by creatively breaking the rules. The rules he broke weren't the rules of chess, business, or life. They were rules we use to chain down our own thinking.

We can all have great vision if we want it. We can all be more masterful of our domains if only we take the time to dream a little.