The methodological structure for reading the thought of Prince Mohammed bin Salman (4): When ideas connect 26

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This methodological pause began with a question: Is there an idea behind the achievement? Then I moved on to a question: Who does the idea belong to? In the previous article, the question was: When does an idea deserve to become independent and become a concept and a title? But something else happened during the work that I couldn't see at first: after I had separated the concepts to understand them, I found myself having to put them back together again.

Power was a concept, opportunity was a concept, capability was a concept, and priority, implementation, measurement, flexibility, sustainability, and ambition were other concepts, but the question that began to bother me was no longer: What does each concept mean? Rather: What happens when these ideas connect? Here the reading moved from the single concept to the relationship between concepts. A person may possess the elements of power, but they alone do not turn into an achievement. The state may possess the location, wealth, population, and resources, but possessing them is one thing, and discovering what can be done with them is another thing. Between what we have and what we can do with it, the opportunity appears, but the opportunities are too numerous to seize all of them, and the potential is broader than the resources available at one moment. Therefore, we need priority: that is, choosing what should be presented from among the possibilities, but choosing the opportunity does not mean the ability to achieve it, and from here the ability appears: the ability of the person, the institution, the government, and the economy, to transform the choice into action, and then comes implementation, and even implementation does not close the circle; Because what has been implemented needs to be measured, and what is measured may reveal a gap between the target and the achieved, and this gap requires review, correction, and flexibility, and what succeeds once is not enough to succeed once; The question of sustainability remains: Can the achievement continue? Then the journey does not end with success, because success itself may raise the ceiling of the possible, and ambition appears again, and thus the concepts that seemed adjacent began to reveal relationships between them.

I did not find a text by His Highness the Prince that said: This is my intellectual system, and these are its stages, and I did not search for a text of this kind. Because his presence is not a condition for reading, what I found was the repetition of certain relationships in his speech, in the documents of the project he leads, and in the working methods that arose during it.

Saudi Vision 2030 itself begins with the kingdom’s strengths: its Arab and Islamic depth, its investment capacity, and its geographical location. Then it moves on to talking about doubling capabilities, opening opportunities, implementation, measuring the performance of government agencies, and looking to the future. In His Highness the Prince’s talk about government work, the relationship appears in another way. Before achieving aspirations and opportunities, as he said in his talk about the first years of the vision, it was necessary to build the team and then build the “machine” capable of achieving. Opportunity, then, is not an achievement. Ability is not an opportunity, a plan is not an implementation, and the result is not a measurement. Rather, each one of them performs a different function within the movement itself.

Here I realized that the error can occur in two opposite directions. The first is to separate concepts to the point that they become islands with no connection between them, and the second is to bring them to a point where we erase the differences between them. This is why disassembly was necessary first, and then synthesis became necessary. We separate concepts until we understand them, then connect them until we understand thought. Through this disassembly and reassembly, an interpretive cycle began to take shape before me that can be summarized thus: diagnosing reality, discovering sources of strength, exploring opportunities, arranging priority, building capacity, defining the target, And institutionalization, implementation, measurement, review and correction, flexibility, then impact and sustainability, before the ceiling of ambition rises again, but I must put a clear line under this phrase: This is not a theory announced by His Highness the Prince in this order, but rather an interpretive model that this reading extracted from the material that I studied, and the difference is fundamental. The researcher’s task is not to attribute to those he is studying ideas that he did not say, but rather to search in his statements, positions and decisions for an intellectual system in which the concepts are connected and integrated, and then He clarifies that what he inferred from the relationships between them is an explanatory structure that he arrived at through research and analysis, not a theory announced by the author of the thought, and that this structure remains open to testing, review, modification, and even reversal if the evidence requires it.

This brings us back to the question with which this quartet began: Is there an idea behind the achievement? I was not looking for a ready-made theory to explain the Saudi transformation, but rather for a logic that could be deduced from the words of His Highness the Prince, his decisions, and the documents of the project he is leading. The reading revealed recurring relationships between concepts that transcend the boundaries of different sectors, and help explain some of the project’s choices and methods of implementation.

Here the difference between conversion and transformation becomes clear. Transformation is the comprehensive project that the state, society, and economy is witnessing. Transformation is the mechanism that transforms potentials into opportunities, opportunities into projects, and targets into results. This process is not achieved by simply making a decision. Rather, it requires institutions capable of implementation, governance that controls responsibilities, integration between sectors, and alignment between ambitions and resources.

Time plays a crucial role in this movement; Opportunities may be lost due to delay, and the value of an achievement is not measured only by what is achieved, but also by the time it took. The future is the direction towards which the project is heading, while ambition represents the height of what it seeks to achieve. The future answers the question: Where to? Ambition answers the question: How high?

However, the relationships I have drawn between these concepts do not represent a closed intellectual construct or a final explanation; New sources may reveal something that requires them to be amended or reconsidered, and therefore review remains an integral part of this reading, not an exceptional procedure imposed by the appearance of an error.

Thus ends the methodological pause that began by asking about the existence of the idea, then moved to its ratio, and testing the independence of its concepts, all the way to discovering the relationships between them: existence, then ratio, then concept, then system.

With this outcome, I return to the articles in the series, not to read each title in isolation, but rather to search for its position in the broader structure. Thought is not only manifested in individual ideas, but in the connections that bring them together, and the logic that governs their movement, and here, when ideas are connected, the features of thought begin to appear.