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Great business names over the ages have often come with the term “visionary” attached to them. They were able to see, to intuit, and to develop markets that people before had never been able to see or even imagine. Think Steve Jobs.
Is this skill innate is it something that only the chosen few have? Well, this is something that Violina Rindova and Luis Martins at the University of Texas in their “The Three Minds of the Strategist” have looked into. And their conclusion is this is learnable. Meaning you can learn it too.
The problem is most businesses focus on the past to predict the future. This is all fine and good, experience helps us behave in predictable environments — it is how our brain is naturally developed to function. But obviously you won’t do anything groundbreaking by just repeating what has been done before.
The issue it that to do these special things in business or in life you need to reimagine the future — you need to use a different set of cognitive skills.
The question then we need to ask is this then a natural predisposition of certain individuals or even organisations and can this be learnt?
“Key to the exercise of imaginative agency is engaging with existing knowledge, memory…
