Strategic Thinking Elements

Several of my clients, already mid-senior leaders in organizations, bring up the topic of how to improve their strategic thinking capabilities as an area for development in coaching sessions. So, they are not unfamiliar with strategy, strategic planning, or strategy execution! Read more

What makes strategic thinking different from strategic planning and why is it still a common area for development in leaders?

This article is based on Strategic Thinking: Can it be taught? by Jeane M Liedtka – a shorter, simpler summary. Reference to the original paper is provided at the end.

Henry Mintzberg, one of the most famous experts in the field of strategic management differentiates strategic planning and strategic thinking as below:

• Strategic planning is the systematic programming of pre-identified strategies from which an action plan is developed,

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• Strategic thinking, on the other hand, is a synthesizing process utilizing intuition and creativity whose outcome is "an integrated perspective of the enterprise."

Prahalad and Hamel, who describe traditional approaches to planning as "form filling", while referring to strategic thinking emphasize Mintzberg’s general themes of creativity, exploration, and understanding discontinuities.

For Ralph Stacey, strategic thinking is "... using analogies and qualitative similarities to develop creative new ideas... (and) designing actions based on new learning." This differs from strategic planning which focuses on following preprogrammed rules.

In general, then, it can be argued that strategic thinking involves thinking and acting within a certain set of assumptions and potential action alternatives as well as challenging existing assumptions and action alternatives, potentially leading to new and more appropriate ones.

So, strategic thinking includes a lot more creative, intuition, and imagination-based processes, thereby involving the Right-brain a lot more. Whereas strategic planning is a data-driven process of planning activities for execution of a pre-determined strategy, typically a Left-brain driven activity!

Is it then still a mystery, why leaders are good at strategic planning while still need development in the area of strategic thinking?

We are all taught to break down and solve problems but rarely taught to think creatively, outside the bounds of current problems and realities!!

So, what are the elements of strategic thinking, and can leaders learn to get better at it?

Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers: Henry Mintzberg

Key elements of strategic thinking were defined very elegantly by Jeane M Liedtka, in her paper Strategic Thinking: Can it be taught?

Gowri S Ramani is one of the few Master Coaches with both ICF-MCC and EMCC-MP credentials.