Learning Together and Creating Possibilities

Managing business in an age of uncertainty requires the ability to create possibilities.

This is the message that runs through the entire book. Its purpose is to provide tools for managing business in an age of uncertainty.

With risk, there are probabilities. With uncertainty, there are no probabilities. We have no knowledge whatsoever of what will happen. This is why we must create possibilities and build the capabilities to act.

A Book for Learning at Work

This book is written for managers with little time to spare. I want to help them learn, internalize ideas and change their managerial behavior. The short lines are intended to make room for pauses and reflection. Each of the six chapters includes a quick summary and a step into practice. You can learn from it even when you have no time to read it from beginning to end.

When time is short, read the summary and the closing question. Choose one action you can try at work. When you want to go deeper, return to the story and the thinking behind it. In dialogue, you can bring your own case, challenge an idea and ask for another approach. Reading and conversation do not replace testing in the real world.

To internalize an idea, express it in your own words. Connect it to a decision that concerns you. To change behavior, choose what you will do differently and in what situation. Set a date to return and examine what you did and what you learned. You can begin with a new question at a management meeting, by testing an assumption or by stopping an investment that is not justified.

I suggest choosing a question and one managerial habit at the outset. What do you do today, and what would you like to do differently? Return to them throughout the book. This will help you see whether learning also changes the way you act.

What you can discover as a participant in this book

Bring a question that matters to you. A dilemma in your business. A decision you face. Or something in your own reality that you want to understand.

Here, you can explore it as you read.

I bring my experience and ideas.

You bring your reality and your thinking.

Artificial intelligence helps us extend the inquiry.

From this encounter, an insight may emerge that none of us had thought of beforehand.

How it works

You read a story, encounter an idea and add your own thoughts.

Then you ask: “What does this mean in my case?”

You can bring a dilemma.

Challenge a conclusion.

Ask for another explanation, an example or a diagram.

The conversation helps you examine the idea against your own reality.

The AI draws on the content of the book.

It suggests questions and lines of thought.

You examine the suggestions.

You decide what to accept, what to reject and what to investigate.

What you can do here

Identify an assumption that limits you.

Clarify what is really holding back progress.

Create a new possibility and examine what it would take for it to exist.

In the digital space, you will be able to explore a numerical example through a simulation. Change the inputs and see what happens to the result.

Examine which assumption affects it.

For example, explore how an accounting profit can coexist with a loss of economic value.

And what needs to change to create value.

The simulation illustrates the relationships in the model. It is not a forecast and does not assign probabilities to an unknown future.

Experimenting in the real world helps you test whether these relationships fit your case.

What I bring to the encounter

Years of experience in management and consulting. In strategic, business, economic and financial thinking. And in understanding the role of human capital and social capital.

My stories and insights are a starting point.

Your questions open further paths within them.

Thinking from first principles will help us establish what is grounded in the reality in which we operate. It does not provide knowledge of the future.

Creating possibilities will help us explore what else could be.

What the Literature Review Helped Clarify

After writing the latest draft, I carried out, with the help of AI, a focused literature review. I wanted to examine where my ideas meet approaches already proposed, and what the framework in this book might add. The review brought three central issues into focus.

First, creating possibilities and acting under uncertainty have a rich tradition. I found connections with the work of McGrath and MacMillan, Roger Martin, Sarasvathy, and Rindova and her colleagues. They examined how to create directions, test assumptions and build paths to realization. In the appendix, I present the sources and their connection to this book.

Second, the contribution I seek to develop lies in bringing these elements together in management. Purpose and a foundational principle guide the search. Capabilities and partnerships give a possibility a basis for realization. Economic discipline requires us to justify resources and the cost of capital. Shelving releases resources, while learning is retained for future use. The test of this integration is the decision it helps us make.

Third, the form of the book should support learning at work. The use of AI is a means. Its value will become clear in what the reader understands, examines and does differently. I have therefore clarified the learning paths and the move into action. The framework draws on experience and earlier ideas, and remains open to further testing and learning together.

Choose the path that suits you

This book is being written as part of an evolving work in Hebrew and English. The digital space is intended to connect reading, voice conversations and written dialogue.

You can work through it in sequence. Pause over a single idea. Or return to it when something in your reality changes.

The planned personal workspace is intended to document your thinking.

Sharing an insight, a question or your own case should remain your choice.

This will allow me, too, to learn from the encounter.

The book will be able to develop through new questions, experiments and evidence.

My stories open the book.

What you discover in them may open a possibility in your own story.

Bring a question. We will begin with it.

In every chapter, we will return to the same managerial task. What can we create, test and build to extend our capacity to act?

Learning by Thinking Together