Philosophy and Strategic Thinking: Re-framing Organisations

David Turner
4 days ago
5 min read

Developing concepts with Claude means understanding how Gen AI works and working with it's limitations. During an exploratory workflow today I ask it several questions as starting points to develop the nucleus of a concept. It came back with systems logic: structure, audience, constraints, examples. I told it the thinking would emerge from exploration instead. The AI pushed back. We went sideways anyway.

The best idea came from from breaking the process. A connection between Derrida's interrogation of presence, Deleuze and Guattari's lines of flight, and what happens to human work when execution becomes automatable. That connection only emerged because we stopped following the frame. That is the argument in miniature.

Many organisations operate as if they have a toolbox for thinking. Porter's Five Forces. The funnel. The BCG matrix. STAR interview format. Agile. These frameworks work for the problems they were designed for. They're disastrous for novel ones. They train people to see all problems in categories the framework can handle.

The framework becomes the constraint. What atrophies is the ability that matters: asking whether the frame itself is wrong. When everything looks like a nail, you swing a hammer. When every problem fits Porter's model, you forget there might be a different question entirely.

Philosophy as Cognitive Tooling

Philosophy is cognitive tooling. Different lenses for the same problem.

Derrida interrogates how systems pretend to have grounded authority. He exposes logocentrism - the assumption that presence guarantees validity. Apply that lens and you start asking: what are we treating as true just because it's familiar? What system are we defending out of nostalgia?

In that AI conversation, the moment someone asked "but what if presence doesn't guarantee insight?" - that's a Derridean move. Reframed everything. Wasn't about the framework anymore. It was about what we actually value in human work versus what we're clinging to because it's there.

Deleuze and Guattari offer different lenses. Rhizomatic thinking: problems as horizontal networks, not hierarchies. Stop looking for the root. Look at flows. Assemblage thinking: what matters is the relations between parts, not the parts themselves. Change one relation and the system behaves completely differently. Lines of flight: where does this system want to escape? Innovation lives at the margin.

You don't need to say "rhizome" to build rhizomatic systems. But understanding the concept means you recognise what you're doing, defend it when pressure comes to impose hierarchy, and iterate consciously. The thinking becomes intentional.

Here's the inflection: execution is becoming commoditised. AI is exceptional at it. Code generation. Data analysis. Following process. What AI isn't inclined toward is asking whether the frame is wrong. That requires stepping outside the system, interrogating the assumption, re-framing from scratch.

That's a human move. It requires cognitive flexibility that doesn't come from business school. It comes from serious engagement with ideas that force you to think sideways.

Organisations must now compete on re-framing ability. On seeing a problem differently before everyone else optimises inside the wrong frame. That's not a skill, as much as thinking. And it's becoming the scarcest thing in the room.

Hiring increasingly selects against this. The STAR format is efficient. Situation, Task, Action, Result. You score candidates systematically. You then end up with people who perform established memorised narratives. You don't end up with people who think sideways.

Someone who's read Derrida won't have a STAR story about it. But that reading changed how they interrogate assumptions. They won't score well. Someone who broke a process because they saw it differently might have a messy answer. Real insight often doesn't fit the template.

The system actively filters out the cognitive flexibility you need.

Here's what happens: Organisations sense they need different thinkers. So they create a standardised process for finding them. Which immediately kills the thing. You want explorers. You hire based on how well they follow the exploration template. You get template-followers. It's reterritorialisation - the system captures the escape route.

Re-framing organisations in Practice

Take connected systems - IoT infrastructure for distributed networks. Framework logic pushes toward hierarchy. Master/slave. Centre outbound. Fixed roles.

Rhizomatic and assemblage thinking changes that entirely. Stop looking for control. Look at how different parts connect and how information flows between them. The system starts behaving in ways you didn't predetermine. You build for emergence instead of control.

When I was building these types of programs in the automotive world, rhizomatic and assemblage thinking (terms I hadn't even heard of at that point) were the key. The automotive industry worked - and still does in many respects - in a linear waterfall delivery model where engineers iteratively develop and test according to milestones, and which eventually culminates in a car rolling off a production line. Then the engineers move to the next program, rinse and repeat.

Connected Vehicle however blew that wide open. For the first time, the IT, Digital and Security departments became part of product development. Day-2 operations were required post-launch to pay licenses, keep SIMs switched on, and keep infra running. CI/CD entered the program world thanks to OTA updates.

Those programs required rejection of the linear and adoption of a new way of thinking - one that changed the industry permanently. Having 'A Thousand Plateaus' in the collective organisational consciousness beforehand would have made that process a hundred times more effective.

The same can be observed with the topic of innovation. Formalise "innovation" and you kill it. Breakthroughs happen at the margin, where people break the rules. Then organisations systematise the breakthrough and it dies. 'Lines of Flight' is the lens that shows you why - and shows you before it happens.

The argument here isn't to hire philosophers. It's to embed into organisations people who read widely, think in concepts, and view systems from multiple angles. They're your competitive edge when execution is a commodity. They're the one's Claude can't replace. They're the people asking "is the frame wrong?" when everyone else optimises inside it.

Trust the exploratory process sometimes. Not every problem needs constraints and frameworks first. Sometimes thinking moves sideways. In hiring: make space for candidates who don't fit STAR because their thinking doesn't follow a predetermined path. In 'big five' terms we're looking instead for high openness, moderate-to-low sores for conscientiousness and agreeableness. The profile who memorises 10-15 examples in the right format, answers them linearly (always with 'I' instead of 'we') is not predisposed to be the systems thinker or innovator that the AI-age increasingly requires. In fact linearity is exactly what AI is best-suited to replace.

The modern world is full of execution but short on re-framing. The scarcity today is systems thinking.

David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on strategy, technology assessment, and organisational capability.