Think HistoricallyChris Thurling

Writing

Historical thinking, applied to the decisions agencies actually face.

I am developing a series of pieces on the application of historical thinking to business decisions, drawing on my particular expertise in twentieth-century British history and contemporary geopolitics. Each takes one of the five Cs and turns it on a recognisable agency problem.

Quentin Matsys, The Moneylender and His Wife Contingency · ContextThe retainer that outlived its reasonWhy agency business models persist long after the conditions that created them have gone — and how to tell a living model from a fossil.Read the essay → A printing workshop, woodcut by Jost Amman, 1568 Change over timeEvery tool was once the disruptionWhat four waves of “this changes everything” teach an agency about what actually changes when the tools do — and what merely gets faster.Read the essay → Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp Causality · ComplexityThe halo and the post-mortemWhy winning teams credit their process and losing teams blame their luck — and what the historian’s suspicion of single causes does to a retrospective.Read the essay → Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian Institutional memoryThe firm that forgotGrowth erases memory. A practical case for building the institutional memory that stops a firm relearning every lesson it has already paid for.Read the essay →