Planning for the Unthinkable Through Relentless Innovation

Joshua Cooper Ramo’s new book, The Age of the Unthinkable, provides a useful portrait of our difficult times, and an even more useful set of frameworks for how we ought to be dealing with it.Ramo shares insights he has gathered through dialog with some of what appear to be the world’s most interesting thought leaders in the military, business, science, philosophy, and economics, and together they enable him to define the nature of the challenges we face in a compelling way that justifiably should attract attention.The strength of the book is not necessarily that his thesis is stunningly new – the warnings have been increasing for decades that Western society has been following a dysfunctional set of decision-making strategies. But Ramo links his analysis of contemporary events such as the financial collapse and the failed US occupation of Iraq to broader issues that relate ultimately to the very models of reality that decision makers use, and then to illustrate how flawed models lead to disastrous outcomes.In the end he proposes to a set of strategies that converge on a single conclusion: the only way we’re going to survive in the world of the future (which, by the way, has already arrived) is through innovation.More specifically, “steady, intense, relentless innovation.”Having identified the “what” and “why,” however, Romo does not deal with the “how,” leaving it to the reader, and perhaps to the literature on innovation, to deal with that aspect of things.We may have a few suggestions in that regard, starting probably with the book that this blog is designed around, Permanent Innovation.