Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

The model below shows this process in a slightly other format 160 .actionsdecisionsFeedback experience& results of your actionsDifference betweenwhere you are and whereyou want to beYour goal orpurpose for learningOld mentalmodelsFigure 8: aggegrate modelCreativitySystems thinking recognizes the limits mental models can and will put on one’s viewpoints.It recognizes that the world is always richer than any perspective we have of it. Therefore themore perspectives we can gain the better. Piaget had informed Boyd that ‘a fundamental trait ofscience today is the multiplicity of their interactions, which tend to form a system closedupon itself with many cross-linkings’, words Boyd would almost literally include in his ownwork 161 . An additional relevant point of systems thinking is the awareness that this requires acertain level of curiosity, i.e., a deliberate and continuous search for novelty and new insights. This process,according to systems theory, is what generates new, varied, enriched and improved mentalmodels. As McDermott and O’Connor state,creativity and different sorts of intelligence all involve taking different viewpoints, andtherefore getting different sorts of feedback 162 .Peter Senge referred to this as creative tension and regarded it as a necessity for organizationalas well as for individual learning; ‘the gap is the source of creativity’, words that sound verymuch like Boyd’s own and echo those of Polanyi 163 .Boyd interest in the nature of creativity, and cognitive processes in general surfacesin his investigations as well as his theory. While he studied Quantum theory, Gödel, systemstheory, etc, he also read works by Edward deBono such as New Think: The Use of LateralThinking in the Generation of New Ideas (1971) and Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (1973),Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind (1975), J. Bronowski; The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination160 O’Connor & McDermott, p.124.161 Piaget (1971), p.133.162 O’Connor & McDermott, pp.140-141.163 Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (Doubleday, London,1992), p.150. This book is a highly popular systems-theory based work on organizational learning.112