The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

fast-​changing environments, you can act more rapidly and effect ively than your competitors.

Reflection: To what extent is pattern recognition important in your ​day-​to-​day work? What types of patterns are most consequential, and how effective do you believe you are in recognizing them? Games of strategy, such as chess and Go, are classic domains in which pattern recognition is essential to success. What makes chess grandmasters so much better than average players? One key is their superior ability to perceive important patterns on the chess board and understand the implications for their future moves. In Improve Your Chess Pattern Recognition , Arthur van de Oudeweetering notes, “Pattern recognition is one of the most important mechanisms of chess improvement. Realizing that the position on the board is similar to ones you have seen before helps you quickly grasp the essence of that position and find the most promising continuation.” 1 The evolution of computer programs developed to play strat egy games further highlights the power of pattern recognition. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer system to win a chess match against reigning world champion Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue’s strength came from applying ​brute-​force computing power, using a ​high-​speed machine to search for all potential combinations of moves and countermoves. The engine could evaluate 200 million positions per second and typically searched to a depth of between 6 and 8 moves out, to a maximum of 20 moves or even more in some situations. Today’s best chess engines use a combination of b​rute-​force calculation and ​deep-​learning algorithms running on neural networks. 2 These types of systems are increasingly better than

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