There is a natural limit or caveat to recall when dealing with Horizontal thinking however. One of the tools used fairly liberally is the construction of analogies. Case in point, Dr. Barnett’s borrowing of the concept of System Perturbation from complexity and chaos theorists. It is not used in PNM * exactly* the way the originators of the term would use it in their field but since the global economy of nation-states is a complex system of subsystems, it’s a theory with real-world traction.

When you wander further and further from the sure ground of your own expertise, the greater the risk of your analogy becoming a false model. Collounsbury has been driven to distraction at times by the application of the lessons of the Soviet collapse/Cold War to the Arab-Islamic World. Sometimes there is transfer, particularly with Arab states that consciously aped the East bloc in structure, policy and institutions but often times not. I’ve been guilty of the false analogy here ( my area of concentration in history was US-Soviet relations) occasionally in my analysis and I have not minded a bit when Col or Juan Cole corrected me. Calling me on my sloppy reasoning only makes me sharper.

Horizontal thinking is energized and made purposeful by the cross-disciplinary debate it is intended to evoke. It shakes the vertical experts out of their narrowly framed box and keeps the horizontal visionaries tethered to earth.

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