How To Lead A Quest

10 It's Not About Ideas

The most important question to ask ourselves — in any moment or context — is, Are we making meaningful progress?

In the ‘Experiments' quadrant of Quest-Augmented Strategy, meaningful progress is determining if a strategic option is viable. You might be wondering why this is not about coming up with cool ideas. In fact, we've leapt straight from exploration to experimentation while barely mentioning the ‘i' word.^[1]

This is not to say that ideas aren't important; they are. They are an essential component of how we think and learn. But if you're doing this right, ideas should be happening most of the time as a result of good thinking.

The word ‘idea' is a combination of its Greek meaning of ‘form and pattern', and its base ‘to see'. So, in other words, ideas are patterns we've sensed or detected. If we have established a diverse and stimulating feed, and have allowed ourselves to be immersed in challenging new future contexts, it's very likely we'll have woven a few patterns together into ideas.

These new ideas are certainly not part of our default thinking,^[2] but some might make up some of the strategic options in our quiver. If so, great! When a particular future seems likely to emerge, we can pull these options from our quiver and start testing their validity.

We do this testing by taking a science-based approach (see chapter 11). But before we can ...