What defines a strategic thinker?

Strategic thinking helps you make smart choices that benefit your organisation. But what is it and how can you be a strategic thinker? The following article is taken from a new module on the subject in our Harvard ManageMentor service.

'In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things,' Miyamoto Musashi, The book of five rings.

Managers who think strategically have specific personal traits, behaviours, attitudes, and thinking skills.

Personal traits

You’re on your way to becoming a strategic thinker if you exhibit the following personal traits:

• curiosity: you’re genuinely interested in what’s going on in your unit, company, industry, and wider business environment.
• flexibility: you’re able to adapt approaches and shift ideas when new information suggests the need to do so.
• future focus: you constantly consider how the conditions in which your group and company operate may change in the coming months and years. And you keep an eye out for opportunities that may prove valuable in the future — as well as threats that may be looming.
• positive outlook: you view challenges as opportunities, and you believe that success is possible.
• openness: you welcome new ideas from supervisors, peers, employees, and outside stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and business partners. You also take criticism well by not reacting in a defensive manner.
• breadth: you continually work to broaden your knowledge and experience, so you can see connections and patterns across seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge.

While valuable, these traits alone don’t define you as a strategic thinker. You also need to demonstrate specific behaviours and attitudes.

Behaviours and attitudes

You have the makings of a strategic thinker if you continually anticipate the impact of your actions on a wide range of individuals. This includes, but is not limited to, your boss, direct reports, peers, and customers.

To do this, you need to:

• seek other people’s opinions
• ask questions and challenge assumptions about how the world works
• focus on the future
• identify the forces driving your unit and company’s performance and think about how to improve that performance
• watch the competition
• reassess who your customers are and what they value
• stay up to date on developments occurring in your unit, in other groups in the company, and in your industry overall
• open yourself to ongoing learning by reading books, magazines, and industry reports; attending seminars; and talking with experts.
  

By practicing these behaviours you more readily spot new opportunities. And you identify and repel potential threats before they can do any real damage.

Cognitive capacities

In addition to specific personal traits, behaviours, and attitudes, strategic thinkers show characteristic cognitive capacities. They:

• analyse a situation objectively and evaluate the pros, cons, and implications of any course of action
• grasp abstract ideas and put the pieces together to form a coherent picture
• generate a wide range of options, visualise new possibilities, and formulate fresh approaches to their work
• factor hunches into their decision-making without allowing their hunches to dominate the final outcome
• understand the cause-and-effect linkages among the many elements that make up a system - whether the system is their team, unit, or organisation, or a project or process.

This article was taken from CIMA’s comprehensive database of training information, Harvard ManageMentor. HMM is available to members in the CPD Solutions section of the website. HMM has much more on strategic thinking and many other areas of development.

October 2006