I’ve been doing a very elaborate suite of strategic thinking and planning exercises in the last couple of weeks.
Let me take U back to set context for what I’ve been doing.
In 2017, 2018, and 2019, I went very deep into a rabbit hole: strategy.
I learned everything I could about military and business strategy, and applied it to contexts I cared about.
One of the thinkers I went deep into was the work of Eliyahu Goldratt. Goldratt is most famous for his work with the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which is popularly associated with the well-known word “bottlenecks.” But he also invented something later called The Logical Thinking Processes (LTP). LTP was thoroughly explicated in a pragmatic manner by William Dettmer.
I reviewed some of this material in my article, The Punk Strategy Guide to the Logical Thinking Process. Dettmer’s method is extensive and thorough and requires elaborate care and procedure. It involves seven steps taken in sequence, which presumably would take something like weeks or months to do as a group or corporation.
I have done parts of this method as needed over the years in different contexts and found them incredibly useful. Dettmer would not have recommended doing them as one-off exercises, but I have found it valuable nonetheless.
That said, I recently found myself in need of some strategic thinking and reflection. I have been facing many problems personally and with the Service Guild, and my sense was that using the logical thinking process would help me discern the relationship between these problems and generate solutions to them.
In the past I have used the software program Flying Logic to create the diagrams associated with this process.
I love Flying Logic because it is specifically designed for this purpose and makes it easy to create and see these kinds of diagrams in a way that is unique. However the program is a little bit clunky and I haven’t updated to the newest version because it is subscription based. I purchased a one-time fee for the third version for an expensive cost and accordingly hope to use it for as long as possible. It largely meets my needs despite being a slightly antiquated Java program.
Fast forward. The year is 2026 and AI is abundant. I decided to use AI to help me with this strategic thinking process.
In 2018, I took extensive notes in Evernote on the logical thinking process using many verbatim quotes from Dettmer’s book. I got a free trial of Evernote to log back in and extract (exfiltrate) my notes. I then put the notes in a repository I have locally for my work.
I asked Claude to make SOPs from this material. I gave Claude abundant context about my life and work, including prior material, my writing and correspondence, and also new information. I then proceeded to walk through these logical thinking processes with the support of Claude.
I also had Claude reverse engineer the XML format used by Flying Logic so that I could read and write Flying Logic files from Claude.
This process produced a series of diagrams associated with the Logical Thinking Processes for both myself personally and the Service Guild as a whole collectively. I largely did not participate in the creation of these diagrams, which were generated by Claude based on our conversations, the material I shared, and its know-how about .xlogic files. The diagrams are incredibly accurate and reflect the current reality quite well as well as our desired futures.
I’ve made minor edits here and there manually in Flying Logic, but by and large can edit them through conversations with Claude. Most notably, this process has taken only a week or two and very little difficulty instead of weeks or months and extensive, painstaking, detail-oriented work.
Dettmer would be proud.
These results have already clarified my thinking about the nature of my problems and the Guild’s, as well as my relationship to what solutions we might employ. Certain themes have become clear that were not clear before, and certain solutions have become obvious that were not clear beforehand.
I am delighted by these results and will continue working in this fashion alongside Claude and the spirit of Goldratt and Dettmer.
I expect this to lead to my personal flourishing as well as that of The Service Guild.
Beyond that, I would love to extend this work to the communities I am connected with—to share this work more with the world and do this kind of work for organizations I believe in.