The dilemmas of ignorance

We hear a lot about new ways of doing business. We hear about new forms of virtual organisation, and about revolutions in the way we - as customers and clients - will be enabled to live our lives. We hear that this is to come about through the strategies pursued by businesses, which will produce revolutions in the way industries are organised. But in what sense can strategy be revolution? This cannot be strategy as in long-range planning. Instead, it is strategy as the management of ignorance. Hamel - for instance - encourages businesses to change what they ordinarily ignore, in order to create new possibilities for growth and development. A process such as this cannot be wholly rational, otherwise it would indeed boil down to yet another form of long-range planning. So how are we to make sense of this idea of managing ignorance? One way of approaching this question is to consider the relationship of the conscious ego to the Freudian unconscious. From this perspective, revolution becomes an effect of listening to unconscious processes.