Thinking Like a Strategist

There are a number of ways of thinking about thinking that can help you create better strategies. 

In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer.  Advice to do this is both often given and taken.  Yet this advise skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: Thinking about your own thinking.

Our intentions do not fully control our thoughts.  We become acutely aware of this when we are unable to suppress undesired  ruminations about risk, disease, and death.  A great deal of human thought is not intentional--it just happens.  One consequence is that leaders often generate ideas and strategies without paying attention to their internal process of creation and testing.   There are a number of ways of thinking about thinking that can help you create better strategies.    Inductive leaps are part of both the scientific hypothesis and strategy.   Subjecting your ideas to deeper criticism can help expand your thinking and sharpening your sensitivity can help you see beyond the excitements of crowd thinking to better form independent judgments about important issues.

ACTION POINT: Consider your own process for thinking and look for ways to sharpen and expand it.