3. Strategy & Process

If we have established that our biological imperative is to deliberately shape our own evolution, the immediate question becomes a matter of Strategy.

How do we define strategy? In the context of Bumponomics, we define strategy like this:

"How we decide to organize and act, based on the problems we think we need to address, to meet the outcomes we want to achieve, within the possibilities afforded to us in a complex, dynamic environment."

With this practical definition in place, we are faced with the problem of how we decide to organise and act! If that's the problem then existing options do we have to transform the current problem we are facing into outcomes that result in positive progress?

Exploring Our Options

There are numerous established strategic frameworks that have been developed over time to help us navigate systemic change. Below are just a few examples of some of the most common approaches:

1. Strategic Forecasting:

   • The Approach: Trying to predict the future based on past data, and plotting a sequential path forward.
   • Why it fails for us: It assumes the environment is a predictable mechanism. Treating a complex environment as a predictable machine guarantees failure.

2. Scenario Planning (The Shell Model):

   • The Approach: Creating contingency plans for multiple distinct, plausible futures (e.g., Best Case, Worst Case).
   • Why it fails for us: It is still fundamentally reactive. You are waiting for the environment to happen to you, rather than actively designing and pulling the environment toward your desired outcome.

4. Design Thinking (The IDEO Model):

   • The Approach: Empathizing deeply with the user and rapidly prototyping localized solutions.
   • Why it fails for us: It is fantastic for building a better physical product or interface, but it lacks the structural depth required to completely reshape a complex socio-economic system.

5. The Three Horizons Approach (McKinsey):

   • The Approach: Managing innovation across three time frames (core business, emerging opportunities, and disruptive futures).
   • Why it fails for us: While a useful tracking metric for corporate product pipelines, it lacks the systemic depth to transform human society at scale.

7. Interactive Planning & Idealized Design:
   • The Approach: Choosing to ignore the constraints of the present by designing the ultimate system you would build right now if the current one vanished yesterday, and then interactively planning backward.
   • Why it is a viable option: It encourages you to really think about what you want to achieve and to build the outcome first. Idealized Design is the critical target-setting phase of the broader Interactive Planning framework.

To choose the right option, we must define our desired outcome.

Defining Our Desired Outcomes

Our desired outcome is not to build a slightly better version of the status quo. Our desired outcome is to cultivate an entirely new socio-economic system built specifically for continuous evolution so that we can respond to the challenges and opportunities that we face. We seek to create a framework that treats systemic friction not as a defect, but as the raw fuel needed to power our evolution.

Because this is our target outcome, the choice that seems a good fit for our needs is an active exercise in Interactive Planning—specifically leveraging its core phase, Idealized Design—directly applying the pioneering systems thinking methodologies of Russell Ackoff.

However, there is a critical caveat to this choice. A core principle of Ackoff's Interactive Planning is that everyone affected by the system must participate in planning it, because "no one can plan for anyone else." A written playbook, by its nature, is a static, one-way medium. Therefore, this book serves to establish the foundational parameter space and the Idealized Design. The actual execution of mass Interactive Planning—the act of crowdsourcing human agency and letting participants collectively transform their own pressures—and this will be tackled later as part of our 'Ends' & 'Means' planning.

The framework of questions we just asked—defining the problem, analyzing our transformation options, and selecting the one that achieves our target outcome—is a recursive cognitive pattern that will be repeated throughout this book.

You're in the driving seat. Are you ready to turn the key?