Strategic Thinking: What Should We Be Doing? Why?

Once or twice a year, most businesses go through a period of review. You will have been busy engaging clients/customers, hopefully listening to them and finding out how you can better serve them. This information will then be handed over to those whose responsibility it is to use the information and steer your ship in the right direction for the coming months or year.

When presented with research data or even a general situation, the strategic thinker asks the question “What should we be doing, and why?”

That question is key to innovation. Imagine that we’re a software company. Through feedback forms, we’ve discovered that a significant proportion of our users want a certain feature implemented. Great! We can add to this to our strategic planning.
 

Innovation is Proactive

But an innovative business is not purely reactive to what people want. It’s proactive – a leader. An innovative business gives people things they didn’t even realise they wanted until they have them. Think about how your mobile phone has developed over the years. Cameras, internet access, heart rate monitors etc. Many of these features were not things that we ever thought we would need from a phone but now that we have them, some of us would struggle without them!

It’s all the product of strategic thinking.

A strategic thinker at our hypothetical software company won’t simply seek to respond to what users are asking for, but will go further to understand why and what else we could be doing to make our software the best in its class.
 

Habits of Strategic Thinkers

Strategic thinkers are often of a creative and curious mindset. They work well with large, abstract ideas but retain the discipline to focus on what’s important. You’ll find they’re the best in brainstorming sessions because they’re the ones drawing all the offshoot lines on your whiteboard. The strategic thinker will engage their imagination, illuminating new pathways and have a passion for embracing alternatives. They’re not the ones who want to copy what others are doing, they’re the ones who want to give others a reason to copy them.

The strategic thinker is a driven individual who values a combination of learning and experience. They have a knack for blending the creative with the logical, restricting their input to that which is workable rather than that which is fanciful. Yet they remain naturally optimistic, and willing to provide concrete evidence to support their theories. They identify patterns and trends which inform new possibilities, even where events seem unrelated.
 

Strategic Thinking in Leadership

I recently published an article about putting people in the right seats on the business bus. A strategic thinker in leadership may be more adept at spotting the potential to switch seats. They won’t see or define your people by their current role but will note skills and abilities which may make them the perfect candidate for a different role.

The value a strategic thinker places on flexibility means that they’re also willing to listen to others and become influencers within your business. A strategic thinking leader will never attempt to stifle creativity but will encourage it. Such a dynamic environment can be enormously beneficial to worker morale and productivity. This is especially important as studies have shown that millennials greatly favour vibrant working environments.
 

Making the Tough Decisions

Perhaps most importantly, the strategic thinking leader will make the tough decisions. They will find a balance in the company’s goals, finding ways to improve short-term operations while supporting the long-term growth and vision of the business. They will learn from failures because they recognise each event should not merely be judged as a win or a loss, but an opportunity to learn, grow and become stronger.

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