The Pinnacle of Human Understanding, Circa 1580
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
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We all have our little indulgences in life. One of mine is bibliophilia, or the love of books. (My lovely and long-suffering wife is less charitable and would probably prefer to refer to it as bibliomania!) Between the thousand or so books on strategy of all kinds, management and organizational theory; to my quite reasonable collection of books on African exploration, hunting, natural history and related; and to say nothing of my collection on military history, my study needs to be the size of an average dining room.
The latest edition to my library is quite special. It is an exceedingly rare, vellum bound, original 1580 edition of a Renaissance geographical and literary work by the great Calvinist scientist and theologian Lambert Daneau. A slightly older contemporary of Galileo, Daneau was one of those of that time who, like Galileo, also held the view that the earth was not flat but round. He was also a prominent witch hunter, which was unusual for a protestant (at that time anyway,) but that is a story for another time. I did not buy the book for its age alone (426 years,) but rather because it is a very useful aid in understanding and communicating the evolution of strategy.
Daneau's book is the Geographiae Poeticae id est Universae Terrae descriptionis Lugduni: Apud Ludouicum Cloquemin. He has the earth divided into four quadrants: Europe, Africa, Asia and the Universal Sea or Ocean, containing great waves and winds, as well as numerous islands, including the frigid Ultima Thule. He describes how the land emerged out of chaos and then, the principal regions and nations of the earth. Daneau's name has been obliterated on the title page (probably by one of his many enemies) and has been re-written in ink on the opposite blank in an old hand.
Why my interest in this particular book? For me, it is a very strong reminder of just how quickly and how much things have been changing "recently." (I blogged previously about this in my A Brief History of Humanity - The Last 5000 Years.) The human species has been on earth for 2.5 million years. Comparing Daneau's view of the world with our view today represents how our understanding has evolved over the last 0,017% of that time that we have been on the planet.
What, I wonder, will our understanding of our world be in another 0.017%'s time? The renowned physicist Lord Kelvin famously said at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, that all of importance that was to be discovered, had already been discovered. He was wrong. So are those that think that our understanding of science, religion or strategy today represent the pinnacle of possible human achievement. Also those who try to force-fit antiquated notions of strategy onto their 21st Century firms!
Those (myself included) that have set themselves the quest of evolving new strategy models that align with our modern view of the world, often point out that the view of strategy that pervaded the 20th century was driven essentially by post-Renaissance views of science. In this world view, the universe is a structured place and well ordered (although tending to chaos when not managed.)
Every action, Isaac Newton taught us, had an equal and opposite reaction, which was entirely predictable. If something in a system was broken, you simply removed it and replaced or fixed it. Just like a clock.
For most of the past hundred years, management strategy has been heavily influenced by this world view. Hence the focus of structure, planning and hierarchical thinking.
During the twentieth century, our world view changed with the introduction of new ideas through the work of Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking and many others. The universe, we discovered, is not predictable or static, but dynamic and sometimes completely random. It is as important for firms to focus on being robust and resilient to the changes that the market throws at them, as to have a 'strategic plan.' New scientific concepts like complex adaptive systems, chaos theory and quantum mechanics do not only influence emerging concepts of strategy; they are at their core.
Having a real, tangible example of the "old thinking" in one's hands is so much more powerful, when helping people to make the leap from the old thinking to the new thinking, than simply being intellectually aware of it.
That's why I bought the book.
Comments, as always, are most welcome and may be posted below.
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