STRATEGIC THINKING

“ If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”

Strategic thinking is the ability to think on a big and small scale, long and short term, and into the past and the present. While strategic thinking is a valuable skill for everyone in an organization, it becomes increasingly essential as you ascend the ladder. In fact, you may have a difficult time being promoted or succeeding as a leader without it. Yet, no one formally teaches strategic thinking— so it is critical to take the initiative and learn how to do it yourself. This blog is written on how to use strategic thinking to guide the direction of your teams and come up with solutions to key organization problems.

Strategic thinking is a valuable skill for everyone in an organization, but it becomes increasingly essential as you ascend the ladder. In fact, you likely won't be promoted and can't succeed as a leader without it. You stop being evaluated on whether you can implement a task or a project, and you start being asked to conceptualize it and make determinations about what's valuable for you, the company, and other employees to be spending their time on. That is a completely different skillset, yet no one formally teaches you how to do that. It is not like corporations offer a strategy school.

You have to take the initiative to figure it out. Based on the book “Reinventing You and Stand Out.,” we will talk about how to make it a habit in your day-to-day life.

Make Time for Strategy Checklist

One of the biggest challenges professionals face is carving out time for strategic thinking amidst the hurly-burly of daily work obligations. Here is a checklist of questions to help you do it.

Common Inputs

You will notice for many of the processes that the following items will be common inputs. It is important to be familiar with them -

1.     How frequently do you listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks?

2.     Under what circumstances do you listen (such as driving to work, at the gym, or while washing dishes)?

3.     Is there at least one 15-minute period where you can regularly turn it off in order to think about big-picture strategy, instead?

4.     What time during your workweek is least busy (for instance, Friday afternoons)?

5.     Can you try a two-week experiment where you block out one hour per week in your calendar during this time, for strategic thinking? Try it, and if you like the results, make it a habit.

6.     Do you have friends who are also interested in improving their strategic thinking?

If so, can you reach out and ask if they would like to trade ideas, or become accountability partners?

Embrace the mindset of strategic thinking

"What got you here won't get you there."

We spend a lot of our lives being told what to do. You're not going to do very well in grade school if you're constantly questioning the teacher and asking, why are we doing it this way, wouldn't it be easier to do it this other way? So it can be hard to rewire ourselves once we graduate and enter the work world. In fact, for quite a while, it doesn't even seem necessary. What you are praised for and promoted for in the early days is being able to master tasks quickly and execute what you are told to do. Write that report according to the standard format. Check. Design that PowerPoint. Check, check, check. However, your success at doing what you are told is actually misleading. It is great in the early days but if you keep doing it, your career is going to stagnate, stall and eventually decline. As the famed executive coach Marshall Goldsmith says, "What got you here won't get you there." What is useful in the early part of your career and absolutely mandatory later on is the ability to embrace strategic thinking.

It's mandatory for leaders and a skill you have to cultivate. So how do you do it? 

First, it is important to be clear. It's not a one-time activity where you create a strategy and follow it forever. Because conditions change, your strategy needs to change with it and that means strategic thinking, re-evaluating new information and adapting accordingly needs to become an ongoing way of life. 

To cultivate the strategic mindset, think about how you can leverage the following activities -

·       First is questioning assumptions. 

Why do we do it that way? It's a question every five-year-old asks 100 times a day which let's be honest is incredibly annoying but when we stop asking those questions, most people go to the opposite extreme. They hardly question anything at all. If you can interrogate habits and practices in a targeted way, you can often uncover new ideas and efficiencies that others simply have never thought about. 

·       Next is observing.

So much of modern corporate life is about doing, moving faster, quicker, making more things happen. If we spend all our time doing, it means we're not really in a position to observe others whom we can learn from or ourselves which means we can't properly define what we're doing. Even more critically, we're not observing the big picture.

·       Finally, there's reflecting.

In book Stand Out, interview of David Allen, a productivity guru and the author of Getting Things Done. He told something interesting. “To have a breakthrough idea, it doesn't take time. It takes space.” What he meant was that a sparkling insight could happen in an instant.

Questioning assumptions, observing and reflecting are how we can begin to adopt the mindset of strategic thinking.

The sequence of strategy

Vision, Strategy, Goal, Tactics, tools, blah, blah, blah… People often use these terms interchangeably when they want to sound cool and jargony. In addition, it is easy for your thinking to get muddled in the process. What are we actually talking about when we talk about strategy? The key to keeping it straight is thinking about the path from long-term down to short-term. From the big picture down to the details of how it's going to get accomplished. At the far end, you have your vision.

So the question is how do you do that? 

That is where Strategy comes in.

The strategy is about the big picture choices you make, how you decide which road to go down. You decide to take a course in Computer Science rather than in Arts or you decide you're going to become a specialist in artificial intelligence because you believe that that's the next important wave. The strategy is being clear and proactive in choosing what you are going to do, and especially, this is the part people forget, what you are not going to do.

Once you get your strategy down, it is time to think about Goals. 

·       How do you operationalize your strategy? 

·       How do you make it real? 

If you want to become a specialist in AI, maybe that means going back to school for a special degree program. Alternatively, maybe your goal is reading a book a week on AI for the next year.

There are many possible ways to achieve your strategy. In addition, the ones you pick, those are your goals that you work to accomplish. Getting clear on them keeps you honest and ensures you are actually making progress.

However, goals themselves are often too. They are sometimes complex and require many steps. Therefore, to make sure you are not lost or distracted, it is important to get clear on your Tactics. 

You cannot just say you are going to read a book a week and then expect it to magically happen. Your tactic could be blocking out an hour in your calendar every morning before you start work. If you wanted to pursue a degree program, maybe the tactics would involve securing informational interviews with students who are currently enrolled in the program to see if it is a fit.

·       Tactics are the concrete activities you undertake to make your goals, and therefore your strategy, and therefore your vision, come to life. 

Strategic thinking is a virtue, but to make strategy happen, you have to know how the pieces fit together and what goals and tactics you need to implement to succeed.