We start with the present: that the world is a mess. Our institutions, including universities, are not responding well to matters of common and pressing human concern, such as environmental change, energy issues, new media and technologies, the global market, sustainable planning and design, local democratic agency. Strategic thinking in organizations is notoriously weak and underdeveloped. Conversations are fragmented and hurried. Experience teaches us that good strategic discussions are rare and difficult to create.

We propose that standing back from the urgency of making a response to local and short term circumstances, locating strategic thinking in a broad long term perspective, discussing what is going on in the fuller world first, and then facing strategy issues, leads to much more effective decision making.

Our aim is to develop an infrastructure and set of processes for providing such broad and rich context for strategic thinking and decision making — Stanford Strategy Center.

Our experience is that even good meetings end with the cleaning crew erasing all traces that anything interesting happened, that the next meeting is introduced by an email and perhaps a summary PDF attached that few read. Individuals have memories but, without ritual or artifact, groups do not. We therefore propose that the heart of Stanford Strategy Center will be a room (a real architecture and an online presence) with artifacts of past discussion, with easily accessed analog and digital archives.

Creating artifacts of meetings for recall and reuse at a future meeting is a key role rooms can play. We propose the use of a range of analog and digital tools to develop a room with a memory. Even the room itself will be a composite of real and virtual: we have experience of the tremendous potential of online 3D worlds for facilitating internationally distributed encounter and discussion and will be establishing a strategy room in online Second Life as well as experimenting with Stanford's own digital world currently in development in our computer science department. We envisage large printouts of time lines and charts, high resolution and interactive displays enabling navigation through such diagrams and environments — deep visual maps of both past conversations and also broad analytic context for addressing questions such as How did we get here? Where are we now? What are the scenarios going forward?

Modern problems, vicious situations, messes cannot be grasped without visualization. Text only leads to narrow considerations of a few variables. A graphic representation of a complex argument validates the complexity for the participants. If the process of remembrance is well managed, the room will become increasingly valuable in providing cues and context rather than constantly being emptied of collective memory.

We are pursuing this vision with a simple beginning. We are bringing together a diverse group for open, unbounded conversations, adding frames and narratives rather than subtracting them down to what we already know. With humanists and social scientists, artists, corporate leaders and committed citizens, scientists and technologists finding ways of translating their diverse interests and perspectives one into another, we aim to start the process of developing rich analytic and interpretive context for addressing matters of common and pressing human concern. We are experimenting with different means of capturing and embodying the conversations, finding ways of generating the intellectual effervescence, the "buzz" that lies at the heart of collective and co-creative rethinking

We are at an early development stage of Stanford Strategy Center. We have some basic IT infrastructures in place. We are recruiting graduate/postdoc help to build the beginnings of the graphical visualizations and animated archives of the conversations and to help prime the virtual online component of Stanford Strategy Center.

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