[page numbers are referenced from the first page of this work]
p.1 Strategic advantage is frequently gained through surprising manoeuvres and the capacity to surprise, in turn, derives from a cultivated sensitivity to emergent events taking place at the margins. It involves a capability that we will call peripheral awareness. Yet, because the periphery is generally characterised by vagueness, messiness and the inarticulate, it usually escapes the focus and attention of decision-makers. In this paper we show how the art of peripheral awareness can be cultivated... we find that vagueness, the inarticulate and the invisible are viewed as fecund pro-generative potentialities rather than as negative conditions detrimental to meaningful comprehension... playing games can help develop the requisite peripheral sensitivities that are vital to the active awareness of emerging strategic situations.
p.1 many strategic breakthroughs are inextricably linked to a capacity for what we call here 'Peripheral Awareness'. By Peripheral Awareness we mean a refined sensitivity to marginal events and activities taking place on the fringes of focal attention, and the related ability to endure ill-defined situations through resisting premature conceptual closure... that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason... implies containment and endurance rather than the capacity for active intervention: the cultivated resilience to resist premature closure in the face of vagueness and equivocality.
p.2 Peripheral Awareness, a scattering of attention that thrives on an acute realisation that the myriad fringe-activities... taking place outside focal attention may be crucial in shaping the future direction of an unfolding situation... also recognises that in our everyday activities unconscious scanning (Ehrenzweig, 1967: 32-42) takes place all the time despite our being generally unaware of it happening.
p.2 The periphery of the retina of the human eye contains over 120 million rod cells, twenty times more than the cone cells found at the centre of the eye (Hoffman, 1998: 66-67). These rod cells, unlike cone cells, are low-level weak signal detectors highly sensitive to movement but not to shape or color... Its acute sensitivity to movement and change enables us to register vital transformations that are almost imperceptible to focal vision and to, thereby, unconsciously develop a background awareness that is critical to our overall appreciation of an emergent situation.
p.3 Changes in the competitive landscape... tend to start at the periphery and oftentimes unnoticed... real changes... often occur unspectacularly and sometimes imperceptibly on the fringes of active awareness... the ability to sense and act on weak signals before emerging situations are well-defined is a strategic necessity for remaining ahead of the competition.
p.4 the periphery... can only be approached elliptically through the cultivation of a heightened sensitivity to events and activities taking place at the margins of consciousness... eschewing direct engagement and confrontation in favour of detour.
p.4 To truly comprehend the periphery requires us to embrace an alternative world-view in which the vague, the inarticulate and the ambiguous are regarded not as negative features to be eliminated or flushed out, but rather as a fundamental human condition filled with unrealised potentialities... vagueness is the very condition of possibility for focus and clarity to be attained... That which is vague, inarticulate and unformed has a fecundity which serves as the inexhaustible wellspring for innovation and creative response... it is ignorance of our ignorance, and not a simple gap in knowledge, that prevents us from knowing what we do not yet know
p.5 the progressive narrowing of focus of attention also simultaneously blinds decision makers to emerging and unrecognized aspects of experience that may have important future consequences for a business. The paradox is that the very success brought about by the effective exploitation may lead to a failure, being blind-sided by events occurring outside the realm of focal awareness.
p.6 The very ingredients and recipes that enabled effective exploitation and the achievement of early success become the cause of an eventual failure in the inability to adjust to external changing demands.
p.7 the periphery... may be invisible, unseen or absent, but it nevertheless generates tangible effects and consequences.
p.7 restoring an exploratory mindset requires a tolerance of vagueness... we outline as three interrelated elements of this exploratory mindset: accepting messiness; encouraging 'eye-wander' and improvisation; and taking detours.
p.7 Only by starting from the position that ambiguity and vagueness are ineluctably the stuff of real experience can we begin to appreciate the role of focal attention as an effective instrumental selective ordering process that is... vital for the systematic and efficient endeavour of practical living. Ordering affords control and hence the ability to exploit what we find.
p.10 In both instances of music and art training, what is developed is the capacity for a kind of 'scattered' or dispersed attention that is able to follow multiple lines of possibilities of development without the compulsion to prematurely achieve closure.
p.10 The rational, strategic mind with its demand for precision and clarity and its focus on immediate, local causality, visible material outcomes and end-states, finds it difficult to understand how it is possible that major transformations can be brought about by sometimes seemingly insignificant events occurring remotely or peripherally both in space and time... What we have argued for in this paper is the value of a Peripheral Awareness that sensitizes us to such peripheral events and that resists the urge to prematurely seek conceptual closure by attending to and tracing more closely the lines of emergence of a phenomenon.
p.10 the application of knowledge to practice in any field of endeavour requires metis: a cultivated sensitivity and Peripheral Awareness that is particularly attuned to emerging opportunities arising from unfolding local circumstances... Metis is alertness to the strategic advantages afforded by local situations whereby seemingly unfavourable circumstances yield favourable outcomes.
p.11 beneath the aura of human rationality, intention and purposefulness, as biological organisms humans have also acquired a survivalist legacy for practical 'mindless' coping in the course of evolution
p.11 Metis as a crucial feature of Peripheral Awareness that can be cultivated in the playing and mastery of a variety of sports and in combination games like crosswords, Chess, or even mahjong and in the reading of crime novels. In all such instances the player, much like the strategic thinker, cultivates a corner-of-the-eye awareness of the goings on. He/she has to make a decision, on the hoof, based on changing circumstances and amidst the noisiness of an inadequacy of information and hence to rely on his/her subsidiary awareness and unconscious scanning to grasp what is going on beyond the main focus of attention... Chess is the ultimate example of strategic positioning in business environmental manoeuvres; and chess pieces and boards are often found illustrating company reports and strategy textbooks. Chess is linear, focused and mission-led. It relies oupon a precise logic of focused attention, clear judgement, structured reasoning and controlled action.
p.12 Learning to develop Peripheral Awareness is learning to resist the seductions of premature closure... Because we are culturally programmed to develop and exploit our focal vision and not our peripheral vision we often miss significant goings-on that take place on the margins of awareness and fail to grasp the unfolding minutiae of event-situations... Sensitivity to... deep structures can be systematically cultivated through a variety of ways of which we have discussed three: absorbing the noble-picturesque; encouraging 'eye wander'; and taking detours through metis.
