The Capacity Beneath the Strategy: Part Two
by Joseph Pistrui and Dimo Dimov

The second part of the world view and the capacity beneath the strategy.

Part One named the diagnosis. The worldview problem. The limit of tools. The ground that integration requires but cannot build for itself. Part Two is about what builds it.

The Map of the Pyrenees

In a story told by Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian Nobel Prize winning physiologist and biochemist, a Hungarian military unit is lost in the Alps. A blizzard. Deteriorating conditions. Growing despair. Then someone finds a map. Confidence returns. The unit moves, navigates, survives.

Only afterward do they discover: the map is of the Pyrenees.

What saved them was not the map’s accuracy, but the collective hope it kindles — the relational coherence, the improvised judgment, the collective will they already carry to keep reading the ground once the map’s instructions ran out.

Organisations make the same mistake constantly: they adopt a new frame — a strategy, a transformation narrative, an innovation thesis — invest real effort, then discover it doesn’t match the territory it claimed to describe. The frame is blamed and discarded, and the search for another begins. What matters is not what the map stands for, but the developed capacity to read the ground when it runs out.

That capacity — not another strategy, process, or theory of the business, all still maps — is what renewal requires: the ability to remain attuned and generative once conditions are no longer familiar. Its clearest evidence comes not from the innovation literature, but from observing the same challenge across entrepreneurial ventures, corporations, and family enterprises over time.

Three Contexts, One Challenge

That same gap between the map and the ground recurs wherever a system must renew itself, observed here across three contexts — each revealing the same challenge on a different timescale, with different stakes.

In the entrepreneurial venture, the worldview problem compresses into the founding moment — the original bet on what the world needs, confirmed by early success, eventually hardened into a frame the founder can no longer see from inside. Early success is the trap.

In the corporation, the problem unfolds across a strategic cycle: the theory of the business that once produced success becomes the invisible architecture of every later decision, and renewal keeps returning to the same question — can the system release what worked without losing what mattered?

In the family enterprise, the challenge extends across generations — decades, sometimes centuries — and here the developmental reality beneath the strategic one becomes hardest to miss. Venture and corporate cycles compress this problem into quarters and product cycles; family enterprise stretches it across lifetimes, long enough that the difference between a system preserving its past and one generating its future stops being interpretation and becomes simply visible. That capacity cannot be installed. It can only be built, generation after generation, in the quality of engagement between the people carrying the commitment forward.

The Diamond Model

What emerged from these observations was a developmental architecture: four capabilities whose interaction creates the conditions from which a genuinely new frame can emerge.

This is the ground Münchhausen never found. Not a new technique or better grip, but the developed capacity to find your feet before you know exactly where the ground is.

Why these four? The Diamond holds a fundamental tension at its centre — the pull toward renewal and the pull toward continuity, which most organisations experience as opposing forces, innovation against tradition, the next generation against the founding legacy. The Diamond does not resolve that tension; it develops the capacity to hold it long enough for renewal and continuity to reinforce rather than exclude each other.

Connection keeps the feedback loops open through which a system encounters what it needs to renew. Without that openness, difference is filtered out before it can become insight. Values provide continuity, not by preserving the form in which a commitment first succeeded, but by continually asking what that commitment requires now. Imagination extends that inquiry into the future, making it possible to envision possibilities the existing frame cannot yet contain. Coherence holds the whole process together, enabling a system to remain intact under ambiguity, productive conflict, and the pressure to simplify before a new understanding has fully formed.

Each capability depends on the others. Connection without Coherence can dissolve into harmony that forecloses inquiry — picture a family transition where every generation is heard and no one is challenged, and the conversation never arrives anywhere because disagreement itself has come to feel unsafe. Values without Imagination hardens into preservation of a form that has outlived its function — a mature corporation that can recite its founding mission with total sincerity while making decisions that mission no longer actually guides. Imagination without Values drifts from the commitments that give it meaning, while Coherence without Connection becomes control mistaken for steadiness. Each is necessary, but none is sufficient. What Follett named and could not fully specify begins here.

What Development Makes Visible

The capabilities can be developed deliberately; what they generate cannot. As they strengthen and interact, a broader set of dynamics emerges — signs that the developmental work is taking hold.

Trust begins to hold under strain, not only under calm — keeping people in genuine encounter when outcomes remain uncertain and no single perspective can yet claim authority.

Exploration becomes possible without abandoning what matters. Rather than breaking with the past, it extends founding commitments into territory the existing frame could not yet see.

Integrity acts on the best available reading of what a commitment requires before outcomes confirm it is correct. Not certainty. Commitment before confirmation.

Learning compounds as each interpretive encounter builds capacity for the next. The result is not simply more experience, but a system that becomes progressively more capable of inhabiting new frames rather than becoming more efficient within old ones.

This is ingenuity. Not the isolated spark of a clever idea, but the sustained capacity of a system to keep generating genuinely new responses to genuinely new conditions — which is precisely what these four capabilities, interacting, make possible. Ingenuity is not a trait some organisations have and others lack. It is what becomes available once the developmental ground beneath it has been built.

Beyond Innovation

Most innovation investment targets technology, strategy, and process. These are investments in better maps. They are necessary, but not sufficient.

Renewal depends not on better tools but on the developmental capacity beneath them — the relational, interpretive, and adaptive ground from which a genuinely new frame becomes inhabitable rather than merely imaginable.

The lesson extends beyond innovation. The question is not whether change will come — every enterprise eventually meets conditions its founders could not anticipate. The question is whether the system has developed the capacity to meet that change without losing the thread of what makes it worth renewing in the first place.

What closes the innovation gap is not strategic sophistication. It is the capacity to remain faithful to purpose — and to keep discovering, generation after generation, what that faithfulness actually requires.

About the authors:

Joseph Pistrui is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management, co-founder of Generative Learning, and Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at IE University in Madrid.

Dimo Dimov is co-founder of Generative Learning, Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at University of Bath in the UK, and author of two books on entrepreneurship.