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Snapshot: Strategic Thinking

This content has been excerpted from the Core Message section of the Strategic Thinking track in Leadership Advantage. For each track, this section summarizes key learning points and serves as a succinct overview or introduction to a topic.

The Dynamics of Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is not a step-by-step process. It requires a degree of insight and reflection that is not always a natural part of business operations, and involves attributes from both operational and imaginative thinking.

Strategic thinking is linear as well as nonlinear. Linear thinking involves creating sequential relationships between things. It is logically patterned and deals with rules, analysis, and cause-effect predictability. Nonlinear thinking is about interconnectedness and involves intuitive assessments, creativity, innovation, and a holistic view of the organization. Linear thinking is important for organizational purposes. Nonlinear thinking involves imagining how events might affect a goal, then devising effective responses.


Strategic thinking engages the heart as well as the head. The head governs intellect and involves reasoning from evidence. The heart governs emotion and is important for inspiration and motivation. Emotions and feelings are imperative in the process of strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking is visual as well as verbal. Strategic thinking involves making the transition from verbal thinking back to visual thinking. Strategic leaders have the capacity to influence and organize meaning for the organization by creating shared imagery. Verbalization is important for imparting procedural knowledge. Visualization enables leaders to use concrete means to understand and explain abstract concepts using images, metaphors, and models.

Strategic thinking is implicit as well as explicit. Strategic thinking involves two types of knowledge—practical, or explicit, and conceptual, or implicit. Explicit knowledge is fact-related. It is formal, systematic, and gained from interpretation of data. It can be learned as distinct steps, as in a formula or checklist. Implicit knowledge is intuitive and interpretive. It is inferred from observable behavior or performance, and grows from expertise and experience. Without an explicit knowledge base, strategy will lose any sense of organizational consciousness. Implicit knowledge is necessary for flexibility and innovation.

Strategic thinking requires synthesis as well as analysis. Analysis involves deconstruction—breaking down something into its constituent elements. Synthesis involves creation—reconstituting a whole from its parts, seeing the design, and understanding how the pieces fit together. By its nature, analysis is applied in the present. Only synthesis can identify possibilities for the future. Therefore, synthesis and analysis are needed to plot a course from the present to the desired future.

Create Conditions for Strategic Thinking

Leaders and managers must demonstrate and encourage strategic thinking. This requires creating a work environment that enables others to make decisions that work toward a common vision.

Here are some ways you can support strategic thinking in your work environment:

Make strategy a learning process. In essence, strategy is a theory about how an organization can achieve success. That strategy is generated by strategic thinking, but is also informed by knowledge and learning from work experience. To elicit this knowledge, use opportunities to test theories, conduct experiments, and hold debriefing sessions.

Empower others to participate. Employees differ in the type of work they do, and in their authority, experience, and sophistication, but all of them need to be empowered to think strategically.

Reward appropriate risk taking. Employees need to know that the organization trusts them to act independently to make strategic decisions. When a strategic idea or action fails to succeed as planned, avoid punishment and treat people fairly.

Act decisively in the face of uncertainty. In implementing strategy, ambiguity is one of the greatest threats. To maintain strategic momentum, a leader must make decisions quickly, communicate them clearly, and act decisively.

Act with the short term and long term in mind. Strategic leadership is a balancing act of maintaining present effectiveness, while maximizing the potential for future achievement.

© 2016 Skillsoft, Version 3.0.1

Winter 2017 | Return to Issue Home