Have you noticed how often people talk about the importance of strategic thinking? Yet even senior people in organisations tend to be rather vague as to what strategic thinking actually means in practice.
The need for more long-term and reflective thinking with respect to organisational effectiveness and creating alternative futures is increasingly recognised. Yet it often conflicts with the urgent demands for immediate delivery and profit.
So what is strategic thinking?
Strategic thinking is not the same as strategic planning, which writer Henry Mintzberg describes as an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms like 'friendly fire' and 'fun run'! Planning is a practical step that comes after strategic thinking, which expert Phil Hanford defines as "learning to identify and deal, on an on-going basis, with opportunities and threats, issues of the future and of survival."
Strategic thinking is inherently different from operational thinking - Hanford differentiates them according to some key criteria:
| Strategic Thinking | Operational Thinking |
|---|---|
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Learning and change
Strategic thinking is necessarily future oriented. Proactively creating the future entails a very different mindset to waiting for the future to happen and then reacting to it. A corollary of this is that the strategic thinker's rate of learning must be at least equal to the rate of change in the external environment.
Continuous reflection and learning are essential to the divergent thinking that is needed to comprehend the disruptive and many-faceted changes that occur so fast in the modern world. However, people tend to be much more comfortable with their habitual convergent thinking style, which gets them straight to what they know best - budgets and plans.
Practical steps towards strategic thinking
Dan McCarthy offers some ideas towards developing a more strategic leadership mindset:
- Practice 'what's possible' thinking and don't be limited by past failures.
- Avoid the temptation to jump straight to a quick fix - take time to consider options
- Broaden your perspective - strategic thinking requires that you know a little about a lot of things rather than a lot about just one area of expertise
- Be willing to take conscious risks and fail - strategic thinking necessarily entails uncertainty and involves speculation, ambiguity and creativity
- Learn and practice the the characteristics of strategic thinkers:
- curiosity
- flexibility
- future focus
- positive outlook
- openness
- broad perspective
"Strategic thinking is like showering; you have to keep doing it."Olan Hendrix