Strategic mindset, what's that?

Strategic thinking, strategy design and many others buzzy words like strategic mindset are kind of a unicorn in many corporate environments. So why? In a nutshell, strategy is how we, collectively, make it to achieve a certain goal. That said seems easy, but many leaders know that is one of the most difficult things ever, especially when it requires organizational effort to achieve. In this post, I want to share one of my recent learnings related to it.

[..] in a world of right and wrong is difficult to find people with a strategic mindset because on such strategic terms there is no right or wrong choice, or at least we can not know it upfront.

In my experience, in the real world, many times strategy is used to describe anything beyond daily operational thinking, such as introducing innovations or changing processes to better achieve an operational goal. I would say this is a day-to-day strategy at maximum.

A strategic mindset requires what we can call thoughts of 2nd order or thoughts about what we thought (and why). Also requires being able to navigate the enormous amount of contextual information (environment, history and theory) and select the elements that are really relevant. Therefore, jointly with an understanding of the given organization, to be able to use them in the specific context, and implement derivated actions, said in other words: use them to drive practical change.

Overall, these abilities are a discipline in themselves. Such a skill set is not necessary to drive a huge impact or to transform the world, many huge changes had been driven by people who started without it. A strategic mindset is required to later stabilize, and build organizations and systems that benefit from such changes and that can pursue challenging goals with higher chances of success.

To make it a bit more concrete I can explain some examples of this kind of thinking. A given organization can have many different and powerful resources. It can be assets or talent, whatever can make the difference to pursue its vision or goals. But many times the potential of such resources is not met. It can be an asset misused or wrongly operated or it can be talented people doing work where they can use all their potential. Identifying so, designing and leading the implementation of a change to do better here is a good example of a strategic mindset.

Another example can be managing the right balance in an organization between doing what we already do (and we know that we are good at) and exploring what we will need to be doing in the future. This requires deep business understanding as long as a proper interpretation of the trends in the industry and society. Different activities require different internal setups but also to know the chances of success given the environment and internal capacities. Organizational setup to discover new activities requires divergent thinking, to think out of current reality, but efficient organizations require processes to keep the efficiency. So, such a dilemma requires to balance between the short-term risk of exploring and the long-term risk of keeping the focus on the current activity. Finding the right balance for a given context (organization-industry-goals) and driving the change is also a good example of strategic management.

This kind of issue had been already identified and solved in some industries, but in others not. Also, many organizational forms or habits are due to historical threats of such strategic dilemmas (these examples and many others), and a strategic mindset requires to acknowledge of it and the ability to pilot such organizations in the right direction on the evolution over years of the society, technology, the industry, demographics, market trends and so on.

Furthermore, many theories on the strategy matter had been put in place, all of them attempting to be holistic, but not all of them are coincident in the nutshell. Overall, a person with a strategic mindset must be aware of them but also of the fact that non of them are true or correct as matter of fact, just smart and clever explanations and patterns in some areas. Every different context will require a different one (or many), so being able to pick the right one, if any, may be one of the key abilities to have a strategic mindset.

In conclusion, in a world of right and wrong is difficult to find people with a strategic mindset because on such strategic terms there is no right or wrong choice, or at least we can not know it upfront. Somehow is part of what is called "politics" in many big organizations, not all of it, but to operate at such a level is required to have a good sense of the landscape to take strategic decisions properly.

What's been your experience in your organization? do you feel there is the capacity for strategic thinking in the leadership teams? How can you improve your strategic mindset? Share your thoughts in the comments to keep the conversation ongoing!