This thesis reflects upon a significant ten years of my life. In this time, I moved from a career of teaching English at high school level to a career as an influential management consultant specialising in strategic thinking processes. The bridge between these two worlds was my initial consulting career as a technical writer. These different careers moved me between two different paradigms of thinking that on the surface have little to do with each other. But underneath the veneer of difference, I found the love and the methods of my first career increasingly framed the practices and, in the end, the very purpose of my second career. Thus I found myself living a paradox. I had the nous to hang on to the paradox. For paradox can be the useful surface tension that masks the unifying currents of a new theory.

This thesis stalks that ‘New Theory’.

Chapter one begins with the problem. I start by telling a couple of stories, then widen their significance by investigating both a case study and the recent history of planning in organisations. The chapter finishes by reframing the issue as not so much a crisis in the functionality of planning as a crisis in ways of thinking, and ways of thinking about thinking. Having repositioned the problem as a ‘thinking’ problem rather than a ‘strategic’ problem, in chapter two I examine some seminal writers in the business literature who are advocates of new ways of thinking, and link them to some of the writers who influenced me in my English career. These writers have all helped structure my reflections: I trace these influences, but then move beyond them. Whereas they frame the problem as a polarity between common places like ‘right and left brain’ (Mintzberg), or ‘hard and soft’ (Garrett), I frame it as a confusion between ‘describing’ and ‘making’.

Having explored the paradox, in chapters three and four I explore the seminal experiences where I was able to invent the strategic conversation methods which integrated my liberal arts skills with the business context.

The first and earlier case study describes in detail how traditional planning methods worked in a major Australian manufacturing firm. What made this case promising was my partnership with the CEO: he was a creative, intuitive thinker who felt hemmed in by the very planning processes over which he presided. The second, later case study, tracks the development of the conversation process as a method for senior teams to ‘make’ strategy and vision. The seeds that were born in the chapter three case study grow and develop in the chapter four case study.

These few chapters then leave me with a better-articulated ‘problem’– honed into a useful paradox, and five years of experience with business leaders that point to a new way of thinking. What is left for me then, is to dive below the surface tensions, and find deeper currents that could account for the ‘new way of thinking’ at a theoretical rather than merely experiential level. Without that theory, there could be no art. Without an art, there can be no amplification of the method.

In chapter five I search for the art in poetry, and in chapters six and seven I search for it in rhetoric. Poetry was my childhood love, rhetoric my adult love. Three of the great poets who influenced me from childhood are T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth and Coleridge. All wrote profoundly on the theory of poetry, and in particular on the nature of poetic thought. In their theories of poetic thought, I find much that is relevant to construct a theory of ‘strategic’ thought, as I had begun to practise it. Rhetoric is lesser known today than poetry, but ironically is more obviously relevant to businesses. This is because it is a social art, with civic purposes, not a private act of expression. In chapter six, I build a bridge between this ancient art and the modern business situation. In chapter seven I cross the bridge and investigate in more detail three great architects of rhetorical thought, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and how they developed the theory of rhetoric. Their great debate was, ‘Is rhetoric a cosmetic art of words or a formative art of thought?’ I conclude this chapter with Cicero, who not only considered rhetoric an art of thought but also used it as a major tool to build a democratic community.

These three chapters leave me then with the outlines of a new ‘art of thought’ which has been grounded in my experience, but brought to light by the ancient arts of poetry and rhetoric.

The final chapter addresses the heart of the emerging thesis: what purpose governs my methods? In the end, I cannot find such a purpose in the writings of others, or even in my experiences. One can have no theory or art without purpose. I discovered in struggling with this final task that my purpose is not, in the end, to promote effective thinking in organisations, or even to champion a new art of thinking to balance the scientific method. Rather it is to unite the individual and the community around the act of thinking through new futures. This takes my inquiry full circle. I began it with marooned and lonely individuals estranged from formal organisational processes: I finished it with Cicero, the great champion of individual liberties who used rhetoric to create amenable societies. So in the end I discover not just a cognitive process, but a humanistic one.