Thoughtcraft draft 1.1: Preface
We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.
Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance.
This book concerns itself with how ideas are realized. It is a book about thinking, but its focus is not every kind of thought, but that sort of thought which aims toward an idea’s realization in the world outside its originator’s mind. In studying this matter I have, like many before me, found it to be immense. It is as if, wanting to explore the Azores, I had set out from Lisbon and discovered the Americas. The subject contains worlds; whole, well-established arts and sciences are encompassed within it. This, I believe, is why it is so little studied: academics by the nature of their work must go deep, so that each of them can necessarily study only part of a field so vast. Yet as a subject of keen interest to many people in many stations, thoughtcraft deserves, if possible, to be made manageable.
My model for this effort is a military document which, in two editions, has been made public. It is the small book Warfighting, and it treats warfare at a high conceptual level. At around twenty thousand words, it is a small book on a vast topic, yet, by staying above details, it conveys considerable wisdom in a short read. Like many war manuals, it has become standard reading for business executives. Its design is to establish for its readers (U.S. Marines) a common understanding of what is undertaken when a war is fought. My aims are similar, and so I use Warfighting as a model for this essay: “short and easily read.” My goal has been to discern the most important twenty thousand words that can be said about thoughtcraft and say them.
I borrow from Warfighting not only its brevity but its style, because those who need and will engage with my ideas are those for whom thinking is done in warlike environments, where much as at stake and thinking can seldom be allowed to become reverie. (I treat reverie seriously, as a legitimate and valuable form of thought, but those engaged in it will find little motivation to seek out my advice as to how it should be done.) Also, Warfighting is a very cold book about an art, and legitimately so. War encompasses many engineering problems, but is not itself such a problem. The warrior deals in too many uncertainties, and must make too many judgments in unclear circumstances, to succeed only through engineering. And so it is with thoughtcraft.
The quest of an idea for realization is in some sense a quest for territory. In most cases, that territory is other human minds. Even if an idea’s realization will be in a physical object, it must, in most cases, need to find its champions and defeat its opponents. At the heart of this book, then, lies the relationships between the thought and its thinker, and between the communicated idea and its receiver. Crucial, too, is the idea’s fate at the hands of multiple hearers, who will reject, adopt, or adapt it.
The highest duty of any leader in any group is to think clearly, creatively, flexibly, and effectively, and to help their organization to do so. And the highest duty of anyone who originates an idea is to give that idea its best opportunity to be realized and of benefit. This book is intended to provide practical guidance for both. It is not, however, a book of procedures and techniques. Rather, it provides a framework for discerning and understanding the challenges which face ideas and thinkers. Despite a certain arrogance in taking on so vast a subject in so few words, I offer it humbly, in hopes that it will be of help.