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Strategic Thinking

4 min read

  • Asking questions
  • Routinely explore recurring trends.
  • What are the early signs of failure?
  • ‘What does success look like in Y1? Y2? Y3? … ‘

Sounding Strategic

  • Add structure to your written and verbal comms.
  • Ensure the audience understands the core message. This is vital.
  • Prime the audience on what you’re going to discuss (a bit like learning objectives) This way the audience can have a higher level conversation.
  • Give the answer first, don’t build up to the point. Explain how the answer is then arrived at.
  • Too much heads down leads to missing the bigger picture.
  • Requires context, and a solid understanding of the industry.
  • Pay attention to common obstacles.
  • Be upfront with colleagues and recurring problems.
  • Understand the uniqueness of your experience and frame it on a wider scale.

Assuming Appropriate Strategic Focus

  • What are the strategic requirements of my role?
  • Capacity to articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of a given thing in a single statement.
  • Uncover patterns to focus on resource investments.
  • ‘without sound fact on where to allocate resources, squeeky wheels get the grease’
  • For someone to follow through on your particular strategic decision on your behalf, they have to be invested, and believe in the strategy.
  • People’s investment in the idea/project increases when they ‘do the talking’
  • How do small decisions contribute to the larger goal?
  • Make decisions based on reflection not reflexes. Questions for reflection
    • What, Who was involved?
    • What, Who is at stake?
    • What are my misconceptions on risk and opportunity?
    • What are the links between people, plans, and ideas?
  • Don’t underestimate strategic relationships.
  • The strategic perspective is to see the world as a web of ideas, the strategy is the link between the nodes on the graph, and the weighting of vertices and edges is value/risk/whatever other variable.
  • The choices you make, as for which path in the graph to follow is your strategic judgement. The reason these choices are difficult is because they have real-world, sometimes unintended, consequences.
  • You are more strategic if you take action then course correct, as opposed to being stagnant. Don’t be afraid to make decisions.

Strategic Thinking Course

  • Contributing to the long-term success of the company by thinking about the bigger picture, challenging assumptions, and looking into the future for more opportunities.
  • Strategic planning is different to strategic thinking. This is the planning phase.
  • **Look for trends
  • **Challenge assumptions
  • **Anticipate opportunities and threats
  • Allocate time for looking back, then looking in the future.

Looking at the Big Picture

  • Sign up to industry newsletter
  • Read up on company competitors
  • Read company annual report

Question Types to Ask

  • Clarifying Questions - for investigating someone’s thinking
    • Can you tell me more
  • Adjoining Questions - for exploring new applications
    • How do you apply in a different context
  • Funneling Questions - for diving into a process
    • ‘how was this done’
    • ‘why did you skip this’
  • Elevating Questions - For seeing the big picture
    • ‘What are the larger issues’

Things to Watch

Biases

  • Confirmation Bias
    • Prevent by:
    • Accurate information
    • Test your theories
    • Ask others
  • Hindsight Bias
    • Prevent by:
    • Keeping detailed notes
    • Explore alternate explanations
  • Group Think
    • Prevent by:
    • People must feel safe to express opinions
    • Independent thinkers
    • Hold your opinion until everyone else has weighed in

Anticipating Opportunities and Threats

  • What do you know to be true?
  • It’s not about perfect predictions When considering the future:
  • What is happening? in what industry? in what markets? who are the customers?
  • What commitments have I made? what commitments has my company made?
  • What strategic directions have already been explored?

When being strategic: should - > could ‘what could we/I do?’

will - > may ‘What may happen?‘

For Anticipating the Future

  • Specify situation you’re looking for and its timeframe.
  • List what you know and what you don’t know
  • Identify up to 4 interesting and relevant scenarios of what the future may develop into
  • Look for opportunities that would be true irrespective of scenario.
  • NOTE: scenarios aren’t perfect predictions.

Graph View

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