A Cognitive Playbook: Frames for Smart Thinking

Strategy and organization are of a piece. Bain & Company's Chris Zook put the matter ironically: "I don't know whether organization is the new strategy, or strategy is the new organization, but it's something like that." Too often, however, these realms are treated as discrete. This course integrates strategy and organization through abstract thinking¿what psychologists call metacognition. You will gain both big-picture scope and nitty-gritty tools for organizational analysis, planning, and change. You will learn how to speed-read the literature on strategy, organization, leadership, management, and the like because so much of it is derivative and redundant. Old wine in new bottles.

At the core of DYNM 6420 are five "cognitive plays," or geometries of thinking: point, linear, curvilinear, angular, and triangular. Each play has its time and place. The challenge is to mix and match appropriately. Playbook shows how. The course is grounded in my most recent book, The Geometry of Strategy, and incorporates material from a book about metacognition that I am writing.

In Rethinking the MBA (Harvard Business Press, 2010) Srikant Datar, David Garvin, and Patrick Cullen quote a representative executive (recruiter): "We want people who can take an unstructured problem...and look at it in a completely different way. We want people who can x-ray through to a different problem while using the same material everyone else has seen....We need people who can look at a problem and see it differently from others. [That way] you break the log jam." This course will enable you to x-ray strategic issues and problems in order to reveal their underlying logic. Most people instinctively think in point or linear terms. Point thinking is either/or. Linear thinking is more of/less of. Point thinking is effective for certain purposes; likewise, linear thinking. 1 Often there is little difference between point- and linear-thinking. The real contrast is between these two patterns and three more powerful kinds: curvilinear, angular and triangular. Curvilinear thinking is like Goldilocks: finding a sweet spot that is "not too hot, not too cold." Angular thinking is what I call MBA-think: best-of-both-worlds, the dominant form of cognition in leading graduate business schools. Triangular thinking goes beyond angular; it is finding parallels with the three interdependent variables that underlie almost every strategic organizational issue: autonomy, control, and cooperation. A Cognitive Playbook is high-concept, low-tech. It is not for everyone. This course will frustrate those who are (1) looking for a highly-structured educational experience, and/or (2) uncomfortable with novelty and ambiguity. Put simply, DYNM 6420 upsets conventional modes of thinking, but the payoff can be profound. Non-DYNM students: Please include a brief job description in your Permissions Request.