Strategic Thinking: What it Is, Characteristics and How to Enhance it

In all areas of life we ​​set goals. Whether in the business world, in school or in life itself, we want to achieve our goals, but we don’t know where to start or what the path will be like.

Like everything in life, a strategy must be followed, a guideline that helps us be clear about whether or not we are making progress in achieving our objectives. We must have a plan, but that plan is not going to appear by magic, it must be meditated.

Strategic thinking It is an approach, a cognitive style if you prefer to call it that, in which current resources are taken into account to see how they help us get closer to the goal we have set for ourselves. Let’s look at it further.

What is strategic thinking?

Strategic thinking It is an approach, a style of seeing and processing things when it comes to moving forward with a project or achieving a goal With it, an end is proposed, analyzing the means available to achieve a proposed goal or objective and then arranging them in such a way that they actually allow the proposed ends to be achieved. This type of thinking involves using the resources in the best possible way to achieve the objective with the lowest temporal, personal and material cost and, in turn, obtain the maximum benefit.

This is a concept that has become very important in the field of marketing, although it can be applied in others beyond the field of business and work, such as education, the military or even daily and personal life. We can use it in learning languages, to make more friends, get a promotion, join a music band… it is useful for practically any area we can think of because it is an approach that focuses on today, today, but with a future perspective.

As its name indicates, this type of thinking involves a strategy with a coordinated action plan focused on achieving a goal. To think strategically we need a dose of realism, a minimum capacity for reflection, synthesis and of course an overview to see if what we are doing is going well or not, in addition to maintaining a flexible mentality, capable of reorganizing the means when the objective changes or unforeseen events arise. These abilities are not acquired by magic, but must be developed through practice.

Characteristics of this type of thinking

Specifying exactly what strategic thinking is is not easy, since it is not something that can be learned from a manual or there are clear guidelines to follow. It is not something theoretical, but something that has to be learned and that, with practice, becomes a habit, a lifestyle and way of treating the goals that one sets for oneself. What we can comment on are its main characteristics that can be defined in four “knowledges”:

1. Know where you want to go

Strategic thinking It implies being clear about where we want to go, that is, having a clearly defined objective or purpose If we do not have it, our strategy completely loses its meaning.

2. Know where we are

It is necessary to know where we are to know if we are making progress. For it we must develop the capacity to define what the current situation is and how far we are from the goal we have set for ourselves.

3. Know how to define the path to follow

This could be considered the central aspect of strategic thinking that involves designing how to achieve what we have proposed.

4. Know how to self-evaluate and correct

Nobody knows how to do things perfect the first time, this is why It is necessary to be a little flexible and know what changes we must incorporate in what we are doing to be successful If it is necessary to change the direction we have taken, it is better to do so rather than insist on following a path that takes us nowhere.

Useful skills to develop strategic thinking

Strategic thinking, by its nature and as we have defined it, can involve a wide repertoire of skills as extensive as you wish to make it. It may require logic, intuition, metacognition, high intrinsic motivation, imagination, analytical and synthetic ability, argumentation, observation. In short, a wide range of actions closely related to executive functions.

In fact, and in relation to all these skills, we can say that chess is a good game to develop strategic thinking since all these abilities are tested.

But we can say that, grouping these skills into specific functional capacities, We can highlight some that allow us to make the path that takes us to achieving the goal a shorter and more successful journey We can say that these skills that allow you to become skilled in developing strategies are mainly three.

1. Give up what is ineffective

As we have mentioned before, you should not continue doing something that is quite likely not to work. You cannot continue with a strategy that is not working with the belief that at some point it will be useful

If it doesn’t work, it is best to throw it away, no matter how much effort we have put into it. You have to have an open mind and be willing to change course, even if it involves some uncertainty, but uncertainty is better than continuing with the certainty that it is not going to work.

2. Formulation of questions

In strategic thinking it is essential to know how to ask the necessary questions, which are almost more important than the answers that can be obtained. If we can define the question, what we want to solve with our project or intervention, we can focus the action plan a lot and the chances of success increase since we run less risk of deviating from the path.

3. Detection of key points

It is necessary to learn to identify what is important for our strategy and project from what may be random or a nuisance or inconvenience. You must know how to see the decisive factors, those aspects that may represent an opportunity so that our project prospers or advances at least.

Strategic competencies according to Liedtka

Jeanne Liedtka is a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business who has studied the phenomenon of strategic thinking. According to her, the main attributes of strategic thinking in practice resemble competencies, of which she highlights five:

1. Systems perspective

Refers to the ability to understand the implications of strategic actions A strategic thinker has a mental model of the entire system they want to create, from start to finish, the role they want to develop within it, and understands the competencies it contains.

2. Focused intent

It is the approach that allows individuals within an organization or project to gather and harness their energy, focus on what is important avoid distractions and concentrate for the time necessary to achieve the goal.

3. Think in time

It involves being able to take into account the past, present and future at the same time, aspects that should influence decision-making and accelerate processes in case they become urgent. Possible future scenarios must be planned.

4. Hypothesis-based thinking

In strategic thinking both creative and critical thinking are combined, since both ways of thinking and making decisions influence and model the strategies that are going to be taken. This competence is, basically, the incorporation of the scientific method in the design of strategies.

5. Intelligent opportunism

With this term Liedtka refers to being receptive to good opportunities Although the strategy takes shape from the beginning of the process, one should not ignore the changes that may occur or new data and resources that have appeared, which can greatly improve the process and it would not be wise to discard them for the sake of simple fact that they were not taken into consideration when designing the first strategy.