The methodological structure for reading the thought of Prince Mohammed bin Salman (3): When the title is hypothesis 25

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The titles of this series were not an index that I prepared before I started writing. Some of them were present from the beginning, some appeared while reading, some seemed to me worthy of a separate article and then I backed away from them, and some of them began as a small idea before the sources revealed to me that there was more behind it than I expected. Here I discovered that the title itself should not be a preconceived conclusion, but rather a hypothesis. When I say: “Opportunity in the Thought of Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” I am not proving by simply placing the title that “Opportunity” is an independent concept in his thought; Rather, I put forward a hypothesis that says that this word has a meaning that goes beyond its passing use, and that it is repeated in a significant way, crosses more than one field, is linked to decisions and policies, and performs a function that can be distinguished from concepts close to it. If the article proves this, the title remains, and if it does not prove it, it is dropped.

This distinction is important; Because one of the problems of writing about leaders and major projects is that the magnitude of the achievement tempts to exaggerate concepts. When you have a broad economic, social, cultural, and administrative transformation in front of you, it becomes easy to extract an idea from every sector, a concept from every phrase, and a title from every repeated word. Then we no longer discover the thought, but rather create it ourselves. This is why it has become the rule that governs the construction of this series: The title is a hypothesis for me before it is an article. If his material did not prove the independence of his idea, I would not write it. Perhaps what happened with “Risks” is a clear example. “Risks in the Thought of Prince Mohammed bin Salman” could have been an independent title. The material is present, and the Prince’s talk about risks is present in more than one place. But the presence of the material is not enough. When the reading expanded, it appeared that risks do not work, in most places, as a stand-alone concept as much as they work within a broader concept, which is “challenge”: diagnosing an obstacle, threat, or difficulty, and then building capacity. necessary to confront or overcome them, and thus the meaning of risks was not lost, but rather its independence was lost, and the difference between the two matters is great, as an idea that does not deserve an independent article does not become an idea that does not exist; It may be part of a larger concept, a mechanism within it, or a result of it. This also happened with words such as “readiness” and “competence.” Each of them could have a title, but testing them showed that they operate in large part within a broader concept, which is “capability.”

On the other hand, the exact opposite happened with “opportunity.” I did not start this series placing “opportunity” among the concepts that I will write about, but the word continued to appear in more than one field: economy, investment, tourism, etc., and most importantly, it did not mean just a good thing that might happen. In His Highness the Prince’s speech, we find a repeated move from the existence of the possibility to discovering the opportunity, and from the opportunity to building the ability to seize it, then to working on it. And in his talk about the speed of transformation, for example, he refused to let speed in itself be a reason for abandoning a viable opportunity. To investigate, and link work on it to developing human capabilities and government capabilities, and here “opportunity” began to transform from a word into a concept, but even repetition is not enough. The abundance of evidence proves presence, but does not prove independence. If we made the number of times a word appears as a standard, the most frequently used words in political and administrative discourse would turn into intellectual concepts, which is not correct. So the most difficult question was: What does this idea do inside the building? Take, for example, “power” and “capacity.” At first glance, they may seem similar, but reading revealed a difference between them. Power refers to the resources, advantages, and assets that the state possesses that can be invested. As for power, it relates to what a state, institution, or person can do with these capabilities. Power, in this sense, answers the question: What do we have? Capacity answers the question: What can we do? When this difference appears in sources, decisions, and paths, the independence of the two concepts becomes more defensible.

The same thing appeared between “The Future” and “Ambition,” which could have been combined under one title. Both of them are heading towards what is to come, but the future indicates the destination they want to reach, while ambition constantly raises the ceiling of that destination, so the future asks: Where to? Ambition asks: How high? Thus, both of them were able to keep their jobs.

On the other hand, “value” could not persist in the same way, as it is strongly present, but it often appears as a result of transforming an opportunity, ability, or resource into an economic or social benefit, and therefore it seemed more related to opportunity, ability, investment, and implementation than to be an independent concept that adds to the map what these concepts do not do.

Thus, the process of constructing titles became more like a process of continuous testing: we first separate the concepts until we understand them, then we bring them closer together to see if the difference between them is real or just linguistic. Meanwhile, another, more important criterion emerged: Does the concept cross domains? If the idea is found in economics alone, it may be an economic concept specific to that field, but when I find the same logic in economics, education, management, technology, investment, and politics, the possibility that we are facing a broader way of thinking becomes stronger, and this is what made some concepts impose themselves on the map.

Opportunity does not remain economic, ability does not remain human, measurement does not remain a management tool, sustainability does not remain environmental, and flexibility does not remain a situational response. It moves between fields, changing its subject, while maintaining its basic function.

The title that has survived today may be revealed by new material that it needs to be amended, and the concept that we incorporated into others may later emerge from evidence that justifies its independence. Therefore, publishing the article does not mean the end of the research in it. Publication is a stop in the research, not an announcement of the end of the research, and keeps the door to review open. Review here is not hesitation, but rather a condition for reading. Because the project that we are reading itself is still moving, and the sources are being renewed, and some of what today seems to be a preliminary idea whose extension may be revealed in the coming years, as well as its limits, that is why I no longer look at the list of titles of this series as a closed table of contents, but rather as a map that has, so far, survived the test. Some titles entered it from the first time, some came late, some came out, and some merged with others, and all of that led me to a rule that is perhaps more important than the list itself: We do not search in the sources for what proves our map; Rather, we allow the sources to redraw the map, but as soon as the concepts began to prove their independence, a question emerged that could not be asked at the beginning: What happens if we connect them back together? Are power, opportunity, capacity, priority, execution, scale, flexibility, sustainability, and ambition merely adjacent concepts, or are there relationships between them that reveal something greater than each individual concept? Here we move from testing the concept to testing the system, because the thought may not appear completely in a single concept; It may appear more clearly in the relationships between concepts, and this is the question of the next article: When ideas connect.