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I’m often asked, are great strategic thinkers born or are they made? And my answer is always yes. The analogy I use is becoming a great marathon runner. You’re not going to become a world-class marathoner if you don’t have the right physiology, the right muscles, the right lungs, but you still need to train very hard, and it’s very similar with strategic thinking. You certainly are born with an endowment. Some people are naturally better at it than others, but there’s so much you can do to develop yourself. And I always tell people don’t worry about the endowment. Focus on the improvement.
The people making the decisions about leaders’ futures are more and more weighting the importance of strategic thinking capability in their decisions about whether you will advance or not. It really is the fast track to the top.
Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking has always been a critical skill at the top. Leaders must be able to recognize emerging challenges and opportunities, establish the right priorities to focus their organizations, and critically mobilize their people to do what’s necessary to adapt to the many changes that are going on today.
There’s a framework, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, called VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. And those four dimensions certainly help characterize the challenges that leaders face. But I do it in a different order because I believe that complexity is the one which presents leaders with the greatest challenges. I use the CUVA rather than the VUCA. The world has become an incredibly complicated place. There are so many interconnections. Having small things happen, like a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal, can have enormous systemic impacts elsewhere. And if you’re not able to deal with the current levels of complexity, you really have no hope of dealing with the rest.
If you can deal with the complexity, then of course the other dimensions are important. Uncertainty, right? Understanding that there may be multiple possible outcomes for very important decisions, characterizing it, using scenarios and other methods to think it through, volatility, building an adaptive organization and an adaptive leadership team that’s capable of responding rapidly to change, and ambiguity, creating the social processes that help you reach consensus about the most critical problems you face and the solutions that will help you move things forward.
Developing the Disciplines
In the research I did on strategic thinking, I identified six key mental disciplines that underlie your ability to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize. The first is pattern recognition, the ability to see important patterns in a sea of noise. The second is systems analysis, which is the ability to create useful models that help you understand very complex situations. The third is mental agility, the ability to go between levels of analysis and think forward in order to see what your organization needs to do.
Helping to mobilize your organization is structured problem-solving, taking your team through a rigorous process of framing and solving the most important problems for your organization. And then visioning, the creation of a shared vision for your organization. And critically political savvy, the ability to navigate the political currents internally and externally to mobilize people to achieve great things. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the six disciplines of strategic thinking is getting precise about what it is. Because if you can’t define what strategic thinking is, you have no opportunity to really assess strategic thinking in your leadership talent and certainly no template for developing strategic thinking capability in your leaders.