Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

As part of its commitment to training a cadre of Israel’s future strategic thinkers, the Reut Institute dedicates one day every month to strengthen the methodological skills of its team.

The annual curriculum of this training program includes “methodological refresher” sessions, lectures by distinguished figures in Israel’s public sector and academia, study visits, and a component on Jewish history and values – generously donated by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

In this context, during January’s training day, Analyst Noa Ecker-Amrani led an excellent workshop focused on strengthening our teams’ writing skills.

February’s training day meanwhile, included two ‘methodological refresher’ sessions delivered by our analysts: Calev Ben-Dor (Thinking in the Age of the Unthinkable), and Yuval Holztman (Paradigm Shifts and Strategic Surprises).

Calev’s session, which discussed cognitive biases, was based on three literature sources: The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo, Expert Political Judgment by Phillip Tetlock and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Following that, Yuval presented a comparative approach to Zvi Lanir and Praxis’ theory of Strategic Surprises with Thomas Kuhn’s book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both sources compose the basic theoretical and methodological tools for Reut’s work in the field of identifying strategic surprises and opportunities and providing support to decision-makers.

The planning of March’s Training Day is already on the way.