Thinking For Visionaries and Innovators

"Crown Jewel of Innovative Leadership"

“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” – Michael Porter

Want to boost your career and create an impressive impact on your organization… or even achieve spectacular results outside of it? Want to make a big splash, maybe even a tsunami of awesome change in your organization, city or state? Want to ramp up your innovation game or maybe just create a brand new game and be seen as an inspired, adventurous visionary? Then learn how to develop the highly sought after three-part skill set of thinking, acting and leading strategically. With our current growing economic inflation and increasing financial problems, our moving closer into what economists are saying might be a nasty, prolonged recession and other myriad of failings and challenges worldwide, creative strategic thinking will help you analyze, think through and innovatively plan to enable your organization or government entity to weather the likely coming storm.

The word “strategic” means “what is essential,” in our case to a high-level strategy, planning, operations or leadership of an organization. In strategic thinking, you are focused on grand strategies dealing with major, far-reaching vital issues and situations and therefore achieving big results through goals and objectives driven by strategies. These are usually matters of utmost importance and impact to the whole organization with longer time horizons affected.

This broad, conceptual thinking usually is surrounded by greater uncertainty, a more comprehensive scope and higher demands on resources. Strategic thinkers are pitching new, bold ideas, unveiling captivating visions, exploring exciting innovations, initiating new projects, and trying to figure out the next really B-I-G thing that makes a significant difference for their company, organization or city. They find out what they need to do today as required for reaching a much larger and extraordinary long-term goal in the future.

How You Think Matters a Lot

Many innovators, industry and military disruptors and those who are eminently successful in any field, for example, believe in thinking in a super-sized and adventurous manner. Considered one of the greatest scholars of the Northern Renaissance, Dutch Philosopher Desiderius Erasmus said, “Fortune favors the audacious.” It often takes courage for being intrepid and committed to one’s daring (perhaps mega-huge) idea or far-out proposed radical solution in any organization, when others are in direct opposition, closed-minded or staunchly welded to the safe and uninspiring status quo of their organization.

Being strategic means ensuring your company’s core competencies are strongly and consistently focusing on those directional choices that best move your organization toward its new and better future with the least risk and in the most orderly fashion. It all starts, though, with a mind and skill set around strategic thinking in a “360 degree telescopic fashion,” which is the ability to envision and plan for a better, more sustainable future.

The Management Research Group (MRG) found that strategic thinking — especially the highly creative kind — was essential to great success and effectiveness in the workplace and twice as important as communication. The word “strategic” relates to and is obviously marked by strategy. As mentioned, we think of strategic involving something that is usually of deep importance and broad in nature and scope in which significant issues are considered in a special way. Strategic relates to long-term or weighty interests and overall goals and the means of achieving them. Strategic thinkers are specially adept at seeing and connecting what seems like random dots to which they so smartly make sense of the whole picture being examined. Strategic thinking is based on a systems perspective — a holistic view of the organization — seeing all the formed dots, their value and what they mean.

Strategic thinking is the first critical building block in operating strategically and innovatively at all levels of the organization. It’s a path-finding process in which leaders explore, assess, view and create attractive results for themselves and others. Adaptive leaders need to have one foot in today and another into tomorrow. Smart companies and other organizations are both proactive and responsive. They think, plan and make things happen at a time that suits them, rather than waiting for events to force them to change.

Most underplayed strategic thinking and planning, though, has choked initiative and favored incremental over substantive change where analytics and extrapolation are emphasized, rather than intuition and imagination around discovery of new possibilities and opportunities. The basic test of whether strategic thinking is valuable and works for you comes down to whether your organization creates superior value for your customers, develops a differentiation that makes it hard for competitors to imitate, lays the groundwork for a great future and makes your organization more innovative and adaptable to potentially awesome, breathtaking change.

Once a high-level strategy is developed and fine-tuned, it’s ready for support and implementation with all employees in the organization. Clearly communicating the strategy, its values and benefits and why it is being applied now is absolutely vital for success. A shocking 95 percent of employees in large corporations either are unaware or don’t understand their company strategies according to a study out of Harvard Business School. It goes further. Research from 23,000 employees found that only a scant 1 in 5 (20 percent) said that they understood how their activities related directly to their organization’s strategies and goals.

Strategic thinking involves understanding and developing an integrated systems perspective and approach by asking deep, broad and ultra-smart questions about critical factors and variables that will influence the ongoing and future success of your firm. After analysis and observations gleaned from those discovery questions, your leaders then make a series of decisions about what actions your organization, city or state, for example, intends to take to enhance their mission and reach their intended future vision.

There’s a solution to every problem. If you’re struggling to come up with it, you need to view the problem from a different perspective, perhaps using Lateral Thinking (term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967), which is an indirect and imaginative approach via novel reasoning not immediately obvious. It involves generating quite unusual ideas rarely not obtainable using only a traditional step-by-step logic approach for mundane ideas. The effective strategic thinker learns to see all sides of an issue and is able to alter the angle from which he or she views that situation to reach for a better answer or solution.

Sights to “See"

To build and exercise your strategic thinking muscles, lift your head up from your daily activities to get to know the big picture. Develop an overall sense of what’s going on in the world, in your industry, in your markets and with your competitors and customers. Be aware of emerging trends and other important changes and interactions and make sure your team is on the lookout as well. Ideal strategic thinking involves three types of “sights” that can affect how you view things:

HINDSIGHT. This is understanding situations or series of events after they happened and the effects upon your organization. While hindsight is 20/20, we can learn from that history that occurred in our organizations, industries and marketplaces and embed those lessons in our upcoming strategy. We must smartly and selectively learn from the past to avoid current and future problems and mistakes.

INSIGHT. This is a deep understanding of something like the elements and causes of current problems or setbacks, opportunities that might be ripe for quick grabbing or anything else that enables you to see the inner nature of something that can improve the outcome of your strategic thinking and strategy. In a study of more than 5,000 executives by McKinsey & Company, it showed that the most important innovation trait for managers in high-performing organizations was the ability to come up with insights. But, the research also showed that only 35 percent of global executives believed their strategies were built on unique, novel insights and only one quarter of them believed that their companies were good at both innovation and strategy.

FORESIGHT. This is the rare ability or activity to mostly accurately predict what will happen or be needed in the future. It’s the act of thinking about and seeing forward to anticipate the likelihood of problems, changes, challenges, chances and anything and everything else that might affect the operation and progress of your organization. Having or developing foresight means no crystal ball or being an “Oracle,” but doing a great deal of research, smartly following trends, technological developments and extrapolating things. Using your refined intuition is a decided asset. 

Challenging Assumptions to Do the “Impossible”

Go a step further to deeply question assumptions about how your industry and markets currently operate. Elon Musk, for example, challenged the prevailing wisdom and engineering belief that the first stage (called “expendable”) boosters of rockets could not be salvaged somehow, but had to be wasted by either burning up in the atmosphere or falling into the ocean. He and his teams brilliantly innovated a way to have his SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage boosters actually land (after each takeoff) to be refurbished numerous times, thus significantly reducing the launch costs of his rockets. The first stage of a rocket traditionally makes up 75 to 80 percent of its total cost. Being able to refurbish (at only 10 percent of the cost of making a new booster) and then reuse the Falcon 9 first stage booster is a massive cost reduction in space travel that they pass along to customers. Prior to that, it was thought to be unachievable by all the experts in the industry. That gave SpaceX a great competitive edge in getting large contracts from NASA and other worldwide customers.

Charles F. Kettering, an inventor, engineer, former head of research for General Motors (1920-1947) and holder of 186 patents said, “Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.” Walt Disney took another perspective, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” While incredibly satisfying to celebrate the tremendous accomplishments afterwards, it requires a boatload of extremely arduous work and disappointing setbacks, until a novel, often unexpected and perhaps monumental solution is found. The “impossible” is simply the untried. So, strategic thinking should fully stretch one’s imagination in all directions in a far out way to bring about technological, process or business model disruptions, breakthroughs and “quantum leaps.”

What Exactly Is Strategy?

Many of us use the term “strategy” for different purposes and some of us misuse or misinterpret what it really is and used for. In an article from the Strategic Thinking Institute, it surprisingly noted that research with 400 companies showed that more than half (55 percent) don’t have a common definition of strategy. Some equate it as a plan, goal, best practices, objective, aspiration or tactic. For many managers and even executives, the term strategy (or strategic plan) causes confusion and conjures up images of huge PowerPoint decks and thick, unread binders collecting dust on shelves somewhere.

One survey done by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management at The University of Toronto found that 67 percent of managers believe their organization is bad at developing strategy. Martin’s research points out that 43 percent of managers cannot even articulate their own strategy in a simple, clear and concise fashion. According to one study from Harvard Business School, a shocking 95 percent of employees in large organizations don’t fully understand or are unaware of their companies’ strategies.

A strategy is essentially a course of actions and allocation of resources to achieve a particular goal like winning or achieving something (e.g. business deal, battle, project, program, change, contest, competition, award, contract), realizing a vision, growing a company, becoming more innovative, being the industry leader or fighting your toughest competitor to capture a (new or established) market segment, for example. Strategy is how you do something to get results you desire — it’s the means of accomplishing the ends. As you know, a goal or objective is what you are aiming to accomplish.

While strategy is about big picture choices, tactics are the individual, smaller steps and actions that will work to accomplish the strategy. Generals and colonel, for example, create strategies while lower-level officers and sergeants are the ones to develop and lead their people in small unit tactics (or other non-military actions) that support the strategy. The same applies in a business context. There’s a saying, “Think strategically, act tactically.” 

A plan is defined as a detailed arrangement, method or program to achieve a goal or objective. Planning is like a roadmap for accomplishing any goal or task while the strategy is the route to get to the goal. The planning process typically involves analyzing opportunities or defining problems, establishing goals and objectives, identifying policies, procedures and resources, establishing roles and responsibilities for people, highlighting options and alternatives, setting timelines, metrics and evaluations, implementing actions and reviewing results and more.

Strategies are usually based on a combination of research, data, analysis, knowledge, experiences, ideas and input from others and plain hunches, emotions and intuition where one takes calculated (and if necessary, uncalculated) risks that we trust will pay off in the future. Effective strategic thinking is about disrupting alignment and status quo in an organization to reimagine and reinvent something new, different and better from what is in the present or past, while strategic planning is remaking the organizations alignment in a new direction and focus from the results of strategic thinking. 

Your vision is the description of how your organization would ideally be transformed in the near-to-distant future. It’s an enticing picture of what your organization aspires to be in the next 3-5-10 years. Thinking strategically and then creating a grand vision and strategic plan — that translates into great performance — are among the most important skills you can have whether you’re in business, government, the military or any organization. Strategic thinking is more indispensable than ever today to deal with the myriad of increasingly complex, vexing problems, challenges, threats and fierce competitions we face in our disruptive and lightening quick changing world. Rigidly sticking to what you are doing can be dangerous.

CEO of Starbucks, Howard Shultz, was adamant about the need for positive, frequent change, “Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.” That also applies to government organizations that are steeped in anti-innovation bureaucracy, waste and performance mediocrity. Former President Ronald Reagan humorously noted, “Status quo, you know is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in.’”

It’s no easy task, though, to lead and change in ways that position a business, organization or government entity for the future while meeting pressing current demands. It requires a different set of skills from operating management within the status quo of any organization. Strategic leadership requires us to think, envision, act and influence others in ways that promote the enduring and rising success of the organization. Strategic thinkers and doers have to manage the tension by focusing and walking the delicate balance between daily tasks and accomplishments and by being the architect of future innovative transformation and its success in the longer term.

About Goals and Objectives

We use these terms interchangeably so often, don’t we? It’s important, though, especially with strategic thinking and planning, to understand the difference between goals and objectives as it affects their interactions. A goal is a short statement of an achievable targeted outcome to be accomplished over a somewhat longer time frame, typically three to five years. Goals are necessary to fulfill the mission and vision of an organization. They are broad descriptions that focus on the intended results, but do not describe the methods used to get the intended outcome.

Examples of goals for a business include things like growing revenues and profits, expanding operations globally, becoming the industry leader, being number one in customer service, increasing operational productivity and efficiency, enhancing your organization’s culture, reengineering your manufacturing processes and updating your older product lines with new competitive features and performance. Now a small-to-medium size growing city might have goals like enhancing infrastructure, attracting high technology and more entrepreneurial businesses, creating a strong brand and publicity, adding new services for residents and businesses, creating a more innovative economic development plan and making the city more “green, clean and beautiful.”

Objectives are specific, measurable, realistic and focused targets that are to be achieved within a shorter timeframe such as one or two years or less to reach a certain goal. Objectives describe the actions, activities and well-defined steps necessary to meet a goal. For example, to achieve the goal of increasing revenues over the next 3 years, a business can have an objective of introducing two new advanced products within the next 9 months to fill a void in their product offerings.

Other examples of objectives for a business might include cutting operating costs by 6 percent within 18 months, increasing marketshare to 8 percent by the end of the next fiscal year, designing and delivering a 2-day intensive innovation program to all 4,500 employees within the next 12-14 months, earning a minimum of 35 percent ROI (Return on Investment) for the newly purchased large 3D printers by the next year and in the following 6 months, increasing staffing in customer service by 25 percent to improve customer satisfaction to 90 percent from 75 percent by year end.

A forward-thinking, entrepreneurial city might have objectives like cutting operating costs by 9-10 percent by year end, expanding their technology park (with infrastructure development) by 250 acres within 12 months and designing and building a 24,000 square foot innovation hub and makerspace building in 16 months. Another detailed objective might be to plant 12,000 trees and shrubs and commission the creation and placement of 15 large creative sculptures (to further beautify and brand the city) in the downtown area in the next 10 months.

Goals, objectives, strategies and plans all work together to achieve an organization’s vision. Goals without well-defined objectives run the risk of being an empty exercise that results in failure to achieve results. Goals are like a destination that gives direction and focus to your efforts. They help set your priorities on what is important and help support decision making. The right goals motivate people to act and help them reach their full potential. Establishing and communicating your goals gives conviction and confidence that the intended goals are achievable. Successful people and organizations know where they are going, how to get there and how long it would take them to reach their destination.

Just as there are benefits to creating effective goals, there is substantial value in developing good objectives. Objectives help in measuring progress toward achieving goals. They help executives and managers make difficult decisions. You can always point to the objectives to make sure you are moving in the right direction in the right ways. If employees know the objectives and have them communicated on a regular basis, they can laser-focus on them, better cooperate with others and feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction when the objectives are met. Finally, setting objectives will show all stakeholders like investors, partners, suppliers and others the direction, innovations and overall improvements and intended progress to which your business is aiming. This could make key stakeholders much more likely to support your plans and efforts.

Ideas and Implementation Spell Triumph

Valuable (especially innovative) ideas are what good strategy is really about. And, fresh, novel concepts, frameworks, models and techniques all provide us with new windows that give us an expanded vista of possibilities and opportunities to help us escape the limitations imposed by our inevitably narrow ways of seeing our world. That’s really strategy as an art creating “intelligent opportunism.” Good strategy begs action. Richard M. Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo & Company noted, “A vision and strategy aren’t enough. The long term key to success is execution each day, every day.” Smart organizational strategies are flexible and nimble, enabling good action rather than constraining it. Companies that continue to prosper over the long term update and adapt their strategies as situations and needs change. Strategies should not be straightjackets that constrain action so much as flexible frameworks for decision-making.

The famous former Chairman and CEO of GE and popular business author and consultant, Jack Welch, had a mantra that might be summed up as focus, consistency and follow-up. He added, “In reality, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” Rather than trying to make your strategy perfect, take action on it fairly quickly and then modify and improve it as you learn from applying it along the way. A strategy that is imaginative, relatively simple (rather than complex) and easy to understand along with strategic plans that encourage application by all involved, the greater the chance of both strategy and supporting plan will be implemented for good results.

Jack Welch described it this way, “Our planning system (for GE) was dynamite when we first put it in. The thinking was fresh, the form mattered little — the format got no points. It was idea-oriented. We then hired a head of planning and he hired two vice presidents and then he hired a planner and the books got thicker and the printing got more sophisticated, and the covers got harder and the drawings got better. The meetings kept getting larger. Nobody can say anything with 16 or 18 people there.”

Gradatim Ferociter” is the latin motto of Bezos's company Blue Origin. It means step by step, ferociously. According to Bezos, “Basically, you can't skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time, there are no shortcuts, but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.” Strategic thinking conjures up a spectrum of ordinary-to-revolutionary ideas to optimally deal with changing environments and situations, multiple threats, vexing problems and challenges in our world — now and in the near future. Anticipating major shifts that will affect your organization and identifying emerging opportunities are part of the thinking process. Just look at the glaringly pessimistic headlines in any newspaper, online forums or news websites to better appreciate Albert Einstein’s cautionary note to us when he said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

Why does there tend to be a persistent strategy-to-performance gap for so many companies and organizations? Most of them have ambitious plans for growth, operational and financial improvement and perhaps boosted innovation. Unfortunately, as various statistics and research shows, few ever realize achieving their desired results. Chris Zook and James Allen in their book Profit from the Core, report that between 1988 and 1998, seven out of eight companies in a global sample of 1,854 large corporations failed to achieve profitable growth. These companies could not produce a 5.5 percent annual real growth in revenues and earnings while earning their cost of capital, which was a modest hurdle. Yet, 90 percent of the companies in the study had developed strategies and connected strategic plans with much higher targets.

Why the difference between optimistic ambition and performance? The gap arises, Zook and Allen believe, from a disconnect in most companies between strategy formulation and strategy execution. The author’s research revealed that, about 95 percent of a company’s employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy. If the employees who are closest to customers and who operate processes that create value are unaware of the strategy, they surely cannot help the organization implement it effectively.

The companies they studied, however, recognize that effective strategy execution requires good communication of the corporate strategy, ensuring that enterprise-level plans are translated into the plans of the various units and departments and aligning employees’ competency development plans and their personal goals and incentives, with strategic objectives. What’s more, smart leaders admit that their company’s strategy must be tested and adapted so as not to lose their luster and impact with a changing competitive landscape and other evolving situations.

Strategic Thinking is Essential, But Not Easy

In an article in the Harvard Business Review in June 2018, the author noted that in one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97 percent said that being (thinking and acting) strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization’s outcomes. Yet, how many leaders are good at it and spend the time to learn to do it properly? Dr. John Kotter, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, is a major thought leader in business, leadership and change and the author of 21 books. He found that only around 5 percent of all organizations implemented their strategies successfully, while 70 percent of strategic initiatives failed to meet their objectives. The remaining 25 percent had some middle-of-the-road success, but nowhere near the full potential of the strategy that was crafted. If truly representative of most organizations, this is unnerving and sadly illustrates a tremendous waste of effort and loss of opportunities to improve and steadily progress toward the future.

Organizations need strategic thinkers who imagine outside of today’s “reality.” They have to be able to free themselves from today’s situations to consider multiple possibilities for how one’s organization’s course may play out in the future. When trying to view future situations dramatically differently, people need to think in creative, unusual ways that have only a loose connection to what today actually looks like. Strategic thinking is all about exploration. Imaginative thinking exercises (as in meetings, workshops or other types of events) will force a group’s thinking toward new paths with unexpected twists, turns and thinking detours. This can initially be difficult for many of us. It’s vital, though, to encourage and reward your team’s full open acceptance to what may seem improbable or even impossible or preposterous today, but believing that bringing about innovations and trying unheard of possibilities will likely make the magic happen.

There are numerous reasons why managers, executives and organizational leaders have challenges coming up with and implementing useful strategies. One of the main ones is time. With more responsibilities and often fewer people to handle them, many people in charge are overwhelmed with just dealing with daily tasks and feel guilty stopping to take time to think strategically about the business. Part of that distraction is “firefighting”— reacting to every issue that comes up, believing all are important and should be handled right away. If managers see their top executives’ firefighter mentality imbedded in the culture, they too will adopt that behavior.

Lack of establishing and focusing on key priorities frustrates managers and affects making a decided difference for the organization. If nothing is taken off the plate, people feel spread too thin and that means spending time on thinking of strategies will go by the wayside. Another problem is gaining support and commitment from others to implement the strategy. This truly exasperates and frustrates many managers. Also, if people simply aren’t aware of the strategy or understand it and the reasons behind it and how it will help them achieve their goals, nothing will happen.

If the wrong people are assigned to the wrong roles or they were not enabled and empowered to fully act or make the right decisions, then the strategy implementation is weakened. But, now what if the leader promotes a well-intentioned strategy that, unfortunately, is way too ambitious given the resources (time, equipment, people and money) available to implement it or it is so complex, only the best minds can grasp it?

One of the most common and vexing and stubborn challenges to strategic thinking and implementation is the rigid adherence to the status quo, believing that “changing what made us successful is foolish and counterproductive.” They may not realize the implications and possible consequences from shifting customer preferences, evolving market trends, sudden competitive inroads and technological breakthroughs that are making their current strategy outright obsolete.

We know that many of us often fear any change in our work or personal life that we perceive might run the risk of upsetting our stability, security and peace of mind. Therefore it’s critical for leaders to compellingly articulate the need and rationale for change (especially urgent change) evidenced through strategic thinking. Finally, lack of effective training for managers, executives and other leaders on thinking, planning and leading strategically stifles the effort to innovate, bring about necessary transformations and move their organization faster toward their vision. 

Research shows that about 90 percent of people such as managers, directors and vice presidents received no training to become skilled business strategists. A Harris Interactive study with 154 companies discovered that only 30 percent of managers were active strategic thinkers. That’s a serious loss of potential opportunities for organizational improvement and upgrading competitive positioning. It can’t be emphasized enough that there is no one ideal or perfect strategy that will continue to last for long periods of time. That’s why developing strategic thinking capability within your organization, with all the change happening around us, is so vital — now more than ever before.

Practically every leader’s and operational manager’s temptation and natural behavior is to deal with what’s directly in front of them, because it seems to them to be more concrete and necessary, if not “urgent.” However, employees and followers value leaders who are not just effective at solving current problems or focusing on immediate situations, but who are smartly looking and planning forward. But if people thoughtfully consider each issue in terms of its priority and affect on operations, they can become more exponentially productive and efficient.

Another impediment to strategic thinking is the lack of available training and effective tools that promotes proficiency and valuable experience for ongoing strategy development and improvement. Strategic thinking can be learned and strengthened as a skill, like any others. There is no one perfect strategy. There are multiple ways to generate new insights on a continual basis to achieve competitive advantage and win in almost any industry. That’s why building up strategic thinking expertise and confidence in doing so is imperative.

Strategic thinking is also not an exercise and process to nail down quickly and easily because it utilizes intuition, imagination, judgment, experience and a temporary suspension of analysis (which is needed in “critical thinking”). Done properly, strategic thinking should unlock and stretch one’s imagination that can lead to out-of-the box breakthroughs in ideas, plans, concepts and solutions. Think about it — how many organizations with their cultures really appreciate and permit far-out, even radical thinking that departs from the usual “safe,” conventional and acceptable (i.e. dull, uninspiring) ways of approaching situations?

Exceptional strategic thinkers are always learning by gathering diverse information and data from numerous sources and experiences. They strive to be open-minded, flexible and adaptable to situations where course corrections are needed. These valuable thinkers seek ideas, advice, solutions and recommendations from others and welcome feedback and even constructive criticism about their approaches and concepts. They understand and accept the need (or, at least tolerate) even strong, passionate counter arguments ripe with opposing ideas, opinions or positions. Strategic thinking is taking timely initiative and doing things before being asked instead of responding reactively.

Chess As Metaphor

The game of chess is often seen as a microcosm of the ways we use strategic thinking. Chess can help us develop this skill because we get immediate feedback on our strategic decisions and it shows the numerous benefits of thinking ahead (as far as possible) to give us options and attractive possibilities to exploit. Chess is considered to be a strategy and tactics game that to win, you must have a better series of actions than your opponent. Success in chess is to position playing pieces in a way that creates advantage over the other player, like in business.

Great chess players survey the board from above, looking for patterns that show the intent, mindset and psychology of their opponent, as well as identifying immediate and future advancements for themselves. Time is a factor and players need to decide when to take quick, decisive action and when to hold off to analyze the situation before acting. Preparation, analysis, staging, execution and ultimate winning of chess matches is seen as a useful analog to business and other organizations because in a similar way, smart leaders think carefully and then take specific actions in moving their firms ahead.

Leaders survey the competitive environment trying to identify the intent of competitors and anticipating changes in the market, the political and social climate and what other potentially disruptive or threatening changes are on the horizon. As in playing chess, they make strategic decisions to mitigate risk, take positions of advantage, and focus on areas of greatest opportunity. Ideally, all decisions by them are made to reach a longer-term vision and major goals to win.

While there are those who think chess is a somewhat inaccurate metaphor, many others, including myself, feel it is a useful, if imperfect symbol, to better understand the mechanics and functionality of strategic thinking, including problem solving using a form of both critical and creative thinking. When asked what use chess was, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz said that it provided “practice in the ability to think and innovate.” It’s believed that over 600 million people play chess regularly around the world.

The mental athletes that develop strong analytical thinking abilities in chess develop a talent for rapidly calculating probabilities for spotting problems and opportunities and balancing likely risks against rewards. There are numerous analogous abilities in chess that also reflect skills in business strategic thinking such as:

• following through quickly and smoothly with your strategy

• analyzing a situation and creating a positive outcome for it

• managing your thinking time well — concentrating and focusing sharply

• being patient with yourself while you strive to think in different, unconventional ways, especially when you seem to be stalled in coming up with answers

• holding up under the pressure, especially in the face of uncertainty

• improving by learning from your setbacks and mistakes

• forming reasonable assumptions, beliefs and generalizations quickly from concrete observations of your opponents’ moves

• carefully studying your competition for strengths, weaknesses, habits and patterns of behavior

• attending to the critical details of your strategy

• applying creative thinking that is unique, daring and bold without the fear of making mistakes

The Ultimate Thinking Project

During World War Two, the British Government created an amazing code-breaking center at Bletchley Park to attempt to decipher German military messages from their superlative code machine and system. The Bletchley Park geniuses epitomized the transcendent forms of human thought process to solve what was believed to be unimaginable to do. In January 1945, at the peak of code-breaking efforts, nearly 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations.

Hitler’s military team came up with the Enigma hardware encrypting device and super-secret code system that was available to send “unbreakable” messages to commanders. It had 159 trillion possible configurations! At the outbreak of the war, the Germans increased their security by changing the cypher system daily, making the task of understanding the code exponentially even more mind-bogglingly difficult.

Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician, along with a team of exceptional people skilled in various thinking disciplines, achieved something tantamount to or even beyond a moon shot or Manhattan Project (creating the atomic bomb) of problem solving — to crack the enigma code, thus saving countless lives and help win the war. All this was done without digital computers or supercomputers! The British government hired all the strongest UK chess masters including two times British chess champion, Hugh Alexander. The Oscar nominated film, the Imitation Game, told this incredible story when it came out in 2014. The Bletchley Park geniuses used creative thinking and critical thinking in ways never before imagined and attempted. Fortunately for us, it worked magnificently!

Military Strategy and the Biggest Strategic Thinking Endeavor

When it comes to strategy, strategic thinking and strategic planning, many of us think of the great military minds in history such as Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Carl Von Clausewitz, George S. Patton and Erwin Rommel among others. These were leaders and commanders who could see the whole picture and its connected parts that envelope their situation. They would understand how all the combined factors, forces and elements formed and interacted to ultimately affect their outcomes for victory. The renowned Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz believed that war and business shared a good deal of these similarities. His insights and strategy significantly influenced modern business, especially developing global business strategies. Ancient Athenian theorist Xenophon (c. 400 B.C.) described the most important attribute for a strategist as “knowing the business which you propose to carry out.”

Strategy initially developed from the need for armies to defeat their enemies. The first studies that discussed strategy were from the Chinese during the period of 400 – 200 B.C. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written in 400 B.C. has received critical acclaim as one of the best works on military strategy. It is still very popular with business and other organization leaders today who embrace and learn from Sun Tzu’s topics around competition, planning, preparedness, collaboration, confrontation, attitude and more. Military strategy is a set of ideas implemented by military organizations to pursue desired major goals. Derived from the Greek word strategos, the term strategy, when it appeared in use during the 18th century, was seen as the "Art of the general" or “The art of arrangement of troops.”

Led by General Dwight Eisenhower, surely one of the most complex, enormous strategic thinking and planning exercises was done for the World War II D-Day invasion of Normandy, France for the Allied liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control. Codenamed Operation Overlord, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The battle began on June 6, 1944, when some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion was the largest amphibious military assaults ever, involving about 11,500 aircraft and almost 7,000 naval vessels.

Within just five days of landing, over 350,000 men along with 54,000 vehicles and over 104,000 tons of supplies, material and equipment came ashore. By June 30th, 850,000 men were in France along with almost 150,000 vehicles and over an astounding 570,000 tons of supplies. It required a staggering amount of analytical, critical and creative thinking focused on trying to identify and understand all situations, possibilities and opportunities and then to perform an exhaustive operational plan that took seemingly everything into consideration. The logistics alone to bring that many men and that much material and equipment on shore was astronomical in scope, size and complication, all done without computers.

Can you just imagine the number of all the people involved and the unprecedented thinking marathon of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of military personnel on how to maneuver and logistically support this massive invasion? They had to meticulously consider the expansive, hardened German defenses, geographic challenges at sea and land, weather conditions, the likely ways the enemy would mine and create obstacles on the beaches, counterattack and other significant threat and risk factors that would make this such a vulnerable and most difficult landing leading to an incursion into the heart of Europe.

With complexity and uncertainty reigning supreme in this never before attempted invasion, the strategic thinkers had to consider all the possible options, trade-offs, contingencies, what-ifs, risks, best bets, probabilities and so much more — to create coordinated elements of success out of the enormity of this vital invasion that would lead to the war’s end.

Because of the great difficulty of landing a huge army on well-defended beaches, Allied planners had to identify or create key aspects of Strategic Advantage. One major strategy called for keeping the German army too dispersed to mount an effective counterattack. Another series of strategies was to use a variety of misinformation to convince the enemy that there were 350,000 Allied soldiers stationed in Scotland ready to invade Europe in its northern regions. The idea was to trick the Nazis into thinking that the invasion would occur at Pas-de-Calais, the closest French coastline to England, the seemingly most logical, shortest and least risky path. Instead, they surprised (a creative aspect of any business or other strategy) the Germans by landing on the five southern beaches instead.

The Allies used fake radio transmissions, double agents, and even a “phantom army,” commanded by American General George Patton, to throw the Germans off the scent. These “ruse and surprise strategies” to mislead opponents dates back millennia and was used brilliantly by Alexander the Great, Napoleon among others. Liddell Hart, a military historian, says that the purpose of strategy is “to diminish the possibility of resistance” and to bring about the most advantageous circumstances. Leaders in organizations and businesses of all types have been reading popular books, watching videos and attending seminars and consulting with successful military veterans (especially those from Special Operations units like Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, Special Forces and Marine and Air Force Special Operators) to better learn how elite military planning, strategies, surprises, tactics, training and resourceful, enterprising leadership can make a difference in their businesses in present and in the future.

Interconnected Steps in Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking (compared to “typical” thinking) involves a greater degree of these aspects: a) thinking more deeply to distinguish core issues and underlying causes from more obvious symptoms; b) thinking more broadly to identify and understand systemic linkages, interactions, patterns, trends and cause-and-effects that will likely impact your organization; and c) thinking about longer-term implications and consequences that might affect the organization. The actual process or act of strategic thinking is more important than the resulting strategies themselves because the situations, problems or opportunities that one will face will change and, therefore, well-honed, experienced and creative strategic thinking can better deal with whatever comes up. The formation of ideas or concepts is called “ideation” and organizations are starving for new, bodacious ideas there can be applied, implemented or commercialized for stunning results.

Three step activity that will generate results from strategic thinking:

STEP ONE: DIVERGENCE. During the strategic thinking process, it’s necessary to let one’s imagination soar in all directions to discover diverse, unusual mild-to-wild ideas, concepts, issues, approaches, situations, and solutions that will later be “engineered” into a superior strategy that envisions a number of potential futures so different and better than the present. This creative, out-of-the-box brainstorming process is called Divergent Thinking because it encourages you and your team to explore and go in all sorts of different directions like an expansive “big bang” blast of thoughts. No limits with unrestrained, no-rules thinking.

It’s important to mention that, at this stage, no ideas are bad or unwanted. Everything should be freely generated without judging, analyzing, censuring, prioritizing, or otherwise holding back on any thoughts made. It’s so valuable because, while it seems like a scattered, unorganized way to think, it actually opens up vast panoramas of possibilities to later analyze, evaluate, prioritize and select for implementation. Divergent thinking, in order to be successful, must be full throttle open, wide-ranging and free-flowing. It’s like having your brain fly at 30,000 feet in all directions, flying above the detail to see what’s on the horizon and what the whole landscape looks like prior to your goal of transforming it.

J.R.R. Tolkien, an English writer, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the fantasy works such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings said, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Ultra-creative people let their minds wander in an aimless (divergent) manner, without purpose or direction to explore and let their imagination roam “in the forest of their imagination” wherever it takes them. Ultimately, that wandering can turn into an unexpected wonder of something magnificent.

STEP TWO: EMERGENCE. Sometime (often in the middle of “ideation,” which is the process of generating ideas) during the open-ended thinking process, concepts and solutions begin to solidify and take shape out of the mix of those ideas. This culling effect is called Emergent Thinking. Reflection takes hold and begins to sort ideas or thoughts out from the divergent thinking. Things start to become clearer, more evident and “make sense” when you and your team move toward formerly unforeseen and vague possibilities that, now, become more apparent when comparing and combining generated ideas. A sharper (though not final) picture and sense of discovery emerges and there’s more of an order of ideas.

STEP THREE: CONVERGENCE. In this rigorous step, your ideas, concepts and other thoughts are sharply narrowed and distilled down to those that you believe are the most viable, feasible and valuable. This is called Convergent Thinking. It involves a structured and organized (intellectually) disciplined approach using logic and analytical reasoning toward a converging viewpoint of precision. The end result is a detailed vision, a clearly defined project, a well-thought-out solution or the beginning of a comprehensive strategic plan, for example. In convergence, you and your team apply narrowing techniques to reject those ideas that don’t lead to effective outcomes and extract what is most important, realistic and likely to succeed. You challenge current beliefs and uncover biases, old thinking, false assumptions and mindsets that breed mediocrity.

While divergent thinking used creative thinking techniques, convergent thinking uses critical thinking that questions everything and uses elements of analysis, judgment, evaluation, prioritization, risk assessment, synthesizing, probabilities, measurements, options, optimization, problem-solving, and decision-making criteria. You ponder what resources and commitment are required and who should be involved and how. While the detail from convergence lacks that of a full-blown strategic plan, the resulting strategy sets the stage for the planning that follows.

Critical Skills Needed for Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking involves developing or improving an entire set of important skills, behaviors and traits. Following is a partial list that skilled strategic thinkers develop or have and use regularly:

ONE: Consummate strategic thinkers use both sides of the brains for impressive results. They apply their left side in analytical, logical and rational ways to find and use data and information from multiple sources to then analyze, evaluate, prioritize and reach conclusions and make informed decisions. They use their right side of brains to visualize, conceptualize and brainstorm creative ideas, possibilities, approaches and solutions. They imagine ways to discover and capitalize upon rich opportunities others have not even explored yet.

TWO: They take time and make a commitment to think broadly and deeply about issues, situations and multiple ways to approach and deal with them. They realize the future is where they will work and be successful, rather than just the present. Many managers, for example, feel pressed on time to get ideas or answers from their teams and usually accept the first workable solution, rather than to “push” further to get a more superior one that has greater positive impact.

THREE: Innovative leaders allocate quality time for their teams to reflect and contribute strategically to the future of their organization. They encourage their people to frequently identify upcoming issues, shape common understanding of situations and frame new, bold and ideal strategic choices that will improve their organization. Strategic leaders then harness the ideas, energy and commitment of staff at all levels of their organization to contribute to the strategy and vision.

FOUR: Competent strategic thinkers actively search for and seek ideas, advice, recommendations and other insights from a variety of people with diverse experiences, talents, skills and viewpoints to help craft optimum strategies and to provide ongoing feedback and course corrections for implementations. True professionals even encourage debate during meetings. The well known business writer and consultant Tom Peters made this point, “Listen to everyone. Ideas come from everywhere.” Innovative leaders allow their staff to identify new and improved ways of operating without being hampered by “the way we’ve always done it.”

FIVE: They are lifelong learners and seekers of wide-ranging information and data from various thought leaders, industries (including competitors), technologies and sciences. By researching trends (social, political, academic, business, technology, scientific, engineering, demographic, other), it will help them see insights from valuable new perspectives and viewpoints that will, then, enable these leaders, with their teams, to create a large map of possibilities and opportunities from which to think and innovate.

SIX: From strategic thinking, they meticulously craft a detailed, exciting and compelling future vision that describes what the organization will look like, act like and be transformed from the present in ways that makes it a better future performer in all the financial, operational and other metrics that matter.

SEVEN: Strategic thinkers will balance their tremendous creativity and imagination with a sense of realism and honesty about what is truly achievable in the longer term. While they have ambitious stretch goals and objectives over the next 3 to 5 (and longer) years from now, they discipline themselves to be realistic optimists and pragmatists.

EIGHT: Being open-minded and non-judgmental. One of the most difficult things is to let go of old ideas, beliefs, assumptions and other thoughts that might have served you well in the past, but not now. It means being willing to consider other very different perspectives or to try out new experiences. Famous English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments said, “The difficulty lies not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” Open-mindedness involves asking tough questions and being active about searching for information that challenges your beliefs, knowledge base and current (really old) ideas. John Milton Cage, an American compose, reinforced that when he said, “I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened by old ones.”

NINE: It’s easier to draw conclusions after carrying out a SWOT analysis — identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that can be applied to an idea, target, position, situation, solution or your entire organization.

TEN: One of the most important questions to ask is “Did I get the results that I wanted?” Strategic thinking is ultimately not just about thinking, it is about (smart and creative) thinking, but also about planning and acting on a daily basis to get your desired results as effectively and efficiently (with time and resources) as possible.

Asking and Framing the Right Questions

As mentioned previously, strategic thinking first involves a divergent form of idea generation, where a team or group develops lots of ideas in a 360 degree fashion, without vetting them at this stage. Any and every idea is welcomed and considered, however far-fetched, unusual or radical. However, in preparation for this ideation process, it’s important to come up with a comprehensive list of initial targeted questions and some needed research to help channel the team’s thinking process along a path that gives some form of needed structure in which to work.

It involves stepping back from your day-to-day operations and asking where your business is headed and what its priorities should be. For example, a medium-size corporation doing their first real strategic thinking effort might have these types of questions (in no particular order following) to generate lots of ideas that will later become the material that will make up a grand strategy and plan:

Some Strategic Thinking Questions for Companies

 • What do we aspire to be in the future? What does that transformation look and feel like?

 • What might our new goals, purpose and mission be for the future?

 • What new, innovative products, services and processes should we consider developing?

 • Where are we now with today’s issues, problems, setbacks and successes?

 • How do we get to our desired future and how will we know when we get there?

 • Where can we add new value to customers and other stakeholders, better differentiate ourselves and innovate our business model?

 • What difficulties, challenges and problems can we expect moving ahead?

 • What exciting, bold and compelling vision should we aim for?

 • How might our industry and markets change in the next 10 years and how do we adjust to it and be in the top categories?

• What new or improved technology and innovations being worked on now will come into being and how might it positively and negatively impact our company?

• What social, customer, political and business trends should we watch for and deal with?

• How do we best leverage our organizational strengths to help in our future transformation?

• What are the likely biggest risks and threats we will face in the years ahead and what should we do to minimize or avoid them?

• What new employees (with specialized skills, education, talents) and resources are needed for our future development?

• What types of investments and innovations might give us the best returns and a leading competitive edge in the next 5-7 years?

 • How would we describe an ideal culture that we would shape to most ideally propel us ahead into the future?

• What near term and future opportunities might crop up to which we should quickly take advantage?

 • What new customers should we try to attract and how can we best keep our current ones?

 • How can we be more creative and innovative in all aspects of our planning and operations?

 • What should be our growth goals and objectives in the years ahead?

 • What competitors should we be concerned with and why? Where might new, unexpected competitors (maybe out of different industries or countries) suddenly begin taking over parts of our market and threatening our position?

• What priority activities, projects and programs should we be focusing on in the years ahead?

• What will our current and new customers expect from us in the future?

• How can we strengthen our overall competitive position in the next 3-5+ years?

• What types of critical decisions should out leaders be prepared for with the expected industry changes over the next 5-10 years?

Some Strategic Thinking Questions for Cities

Here are just some example questions to consider to prepare for strategic thinking sessions with your leadership teams in your city (or state):

• How should our city look like and feel like in the next 5-10 years — our transformational vision?

• What makes a truly “great city with an awesome quality of life for everyone?"

• What can we learn from the best cities in Europe, China, Japan, South America, Mexico and elsewhere? What can we duplicate and perhaps even improve upon?

 • How can we beautify our city or state with architecture, landscaping, infrastructure, works of art, attractions, amenities, environmental upgrades and reduce eye sores?

 • In what ways can we attract the best businesses, organizations and colleges/universities to our locations?

• What are the top 3-5 problems we have and how can we overcome them?

• What would make us more exciting, entertaining, fun and really unique compared to other cities and states?

 • How can we draw more visitors and great residents here?

• How do we become an exemplar of creativity and innovation?

• When we look ahead, what kinds of problems, challenges or obstacles to our longer-term vision can we anticipate? What can we do to prevent or minimize them?

• How do we minimize crime, homelessness, drug abuse and other negative lifestyle situations here?

• What new, imaginative and fun attractions, entertainment venues and activities can we get here?

• How do we improve our city/state services to be more cost and performance effective, productive, efficient and higher quality?

• What are ways for us to be more “intelligently, practically green” to reduce air, water and other pollution?

• How can we smartly get more revenues to support our innovative plans looking ahead?

The Strategic Plan and Planning

Strategic thinking is the story of an exciting journey that sets the critical stage to create a Strategic Plan that then outlines how to implement the strategy and other aspects of the plan toward a strong, viable future of your organization, city or state. The strategic thinking process is the essential core and focus of the strategic plan that enables your leaders to see the big, whole picture of something and gives them options for taking your direction to your goal. That thinking activity is like seeing a map or Google Satellite view from higher up and viewing the different roads, how they connect and what might be the best route to take that will get you to your destination (goal) as quickly and efficiently as possible while avoiding obstacles, problems or delays.

Planning is the overall process and methodology to develop a detailed strategic plan that leaders should implement and in which to operate for success. The key elements of such a usually highly organized plan include your vision and mission statements, detailed goals and objectives (with priority sequences), resources needed, action steps with timelines and scorecards with specific metrics, assigned roles and responsibilities and proposed financial budgets to help you track your progress. A strategic plan typically represents mid-to-long-term goals with a running span of three to five years, though it can go longer.

Most plans will convert the initiatives into financials. In this way, the plan dovetails nicely with the annual budget. Strategic plans become the budget’s descriptive front end, often projecting five years of financials in order to appear “strategic.” It can also include initiatives such as important product and service launches, geographic expansions and construction projects that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goals. A strategic plan is different than a Business Plan which typically focuses on shorter-term (several months to a year and longer) tactical goals and objectives and includes how a budget is divided up among its intended activities.

Strategic plans became a regular business trend in the 1950s and 1960s and enjoyed popularity in the corporate world up until the 1980s, when then started to fall out of favor. However, interest in strategic business planning was restarted in the 1990s and it remains ongoing in modern business and other organizations today in modified forms. Strategic plans can be very burdensome in a large bureaucracy if not developed correctly. They should be as concise, concrete, clear and useful as a tool for leaders to make decisions going forward.

Before Jack Welch became the famous CEO of General Electric (GE), with all its businesses, it was managed by a highly complex, bureaucratic structure by then CEO Reg Jones. Picture a massive conglomerate of 46 devisions, 190 departments, 10 groups and 43 small business units (SBUs) with each developing a strategic plan that had to be reviewed by the CEO, who, naturally was unable to keep up with reading and approving the enormous volumes of the 43 strategic plans.

What did Jack Welch do when he inherited this colossal data dump and bureaucratic monster? He wanted GE to be “lean and agile,” so he focused on eliminating bureaucrats and got rid of the 200 person strategic planning staff. He reduced hierarchical levels from 9 to 4 and worked hard to ensure that line managers (often with the help of staff planners) would be solely responsible for strategy and planning. As a result, GE avoided what Welch described as “having staff talking to staff about what strategies line management should pursue.” Obviously, staff can contribute greatly, mostly by providing detailed, time-consuming analyses that would otherwise be difficult to do. However, line managers not staff, should craft their strategy and plan around it.

Summary

Strategic thinking is systems thinking, creative and critical thinking, solutions thinking, future and forward thinking, longer term and higher level thinking. Strategic thinkers develop a mental model of the complete end-to-end system of value creation and understand the important connections within it. Leaders and others in authority that succeed at embedding capability for strategic thinking throughout their organizations will have created a powerful new source of competitive advantage and continuous progress that results in greater effectiveness, productivity, quality, efficiency and innovation leading to positive growth and financial success. Imaginative strategic thinking along with an effective strategic plan (that is properly implemented) will bring about change for an organization — often massive positive change because it discovers novel, ingenious strategies that rewrite the rules of the competitive game or creates a new game and envisions a potential future (described in a compelling vision) that is significantly different and better than the present.

About the Author

Ray Anthony is the Chief “Innovader” in The Woodlands, Texas, USA. He is the author of 9 books and over 100 articles on organizational change, innovation, leadership, creativity, sales, presentation skills and other strategic business topics. His vanguard book, Innovative Presentations for Dummies (Wiley Publishing) shows how to powerfully reimagine, reinvent and remake presentations that win against the toughest odds. Ray is a successful, dynamic keynote speaker, executive coach, program developer, corporate trainer, videographer and creative who has worked with numerous Fortune 500 corporations and elite U.S. government agencies (CIA, NASA and USSOCOM) to help improve their operational performance and results through creativity and innovation. He can be reached at Innovader@comcast.net or cell: 832-594-4747.