The renaissance strategist: It might be better to explore the contents of a diverse variety of boxes, than to "think outside" of just one box. (STRATEGIC THINKING).

SOME YEARS AGO, NEUROLOGISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY of Lund in Sweden discovered that the human brain can only visit a future it has already seen. That sounds counterintuitive, but it's true--our brain ignores things we have never been in touch with. When Ariel de Geus of Royal Dutch Shell learned of this study, he realized it had important implications for business planning. Based on this seed germinated by doctors, de Geus came up with the idea of developing several futures for his organization--high and low oil prices, shortages and oversupply--in order to prepare the brains of the organization for alternative possible future realities. The idea of scenario planning was born.

It is this kind of experience The Strategy Institute of The Boston Consulting Group wishes to nurture, to give leaders more options, more choices, more ideas to act on. The Institute, established in 1998, is a research unit independent of BCG's consultancy. Rather than extract insights from work for clients, the Institute searches for new perspectives on strategy in various academic disciplines. Through this process, we intend to improve strategic thinking for business and for leaders in general.

We believe that enhancing strategic thinking requires cooperation between business and academia. The best ideas cannot simply be adopted from analogies provided by, for example, neurologists. The richest insights will come from sharing and developing ideas with experts from many fields. Investigations may begin because together we see a potentially fertile, relatively unplowed field. Our investigations are taking us into such areas as history, biology, and anthropology, to name a few.

We are using various approaches to working with academics and professional organizations. For our actual investigations, we are finding that a small team, drawing on outside expertise, seems to work best. Our goal is to improve the quality of strategic thinking both in our company and in the world at large. For that reason, whenever we are at an appropriate stage of discovery, we will share our results through publications or workshops.

Investigation into a Single Work

One of our first efforts was to take a fresh look at the work of an old strategy thinker--with the emphasis on "thinker"--Carl von Clausewitz (1780-183 1). Since Clausewitz's masterwork, On War, is a dense 700 pages that many people quote from but few read in its entirety, we felt that an edited version allowing Clausewitz to …