DATELINE: USAIR commuter from Reagan to Indy, 3 October 2006

My day of red-teaming with other big brains was interesting enough. Think I got at least two columns out of it (ideas that came to me when I wanted to explain why I thought differently from others). One thing reinforced: how you view the future depends on what you know, so each expert tends to come armed with predictions that match his or her background--no matter how narrow.

Lesson for me? If you want to think systematically about the future, eschew functional expertise and vertical thinking and embrace horizontal knowledge and the generalist within.

Yes, you'll be "wrong" more often in any one venue (as experts will constantly argue how "unrealistic" your vision is WRT their subject matter), but you'll also always be more relevant to a wider array of people (yes, there is a real world beyond the Beltway).

At airport, I picked up a second copy of John Nagl's "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," his history of past counter-insurgency campaigns. A cult hit inside the Army and Marines, his expanded edition comes with a new forward that describes his year on the ground in the Sunni Triangle.

A nice surprise: Nagl favorably references PNM in the forward. I am seriously honored.