| Summary: | Big ideas offer big dividends but have stormy beginnings. Even worse is when people cannot visualise the future because their imagination is bent out of focus by short-term ROI or resistance to change status quo! Systemic vision requires individuals who can visualize future issues with dynamic and analytical convergence which balances the odds of probabilistic decision making in a generally uncertain world. It is such ‘inclusive' and out-of-the-box thinking that is uncommon because institutions still offer prizes for depth of expertise, almost exclusively. Erudite scholars such as Murray Gell-Mann and Nicholas Negroponte, continue to comment on the need for individuals with ‘horizontal’ understanding. But, academic status quo and paucity of such enlightened views are discouraging individuals to pursue a broad spectrum of ‘horizontal’ understanding. In "Darwin's Middle Road" that Stephen Jay Gould wrote for his monthly column in the Natural History magazine, Gould once said, "if genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields."
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