Strategic Thinking: what it is and how to do it

Maree Conway VISTA Conference May 2009

A bit about me
1999-2005 Managed their planning/quality units Long and good career in CAEs, TAFE, universities 2005-2007

2007.integrating long term thinking into strategy development, using futures approaches

Capture your thoughts

As we work through the session, write down changes you can make in how you think and do when you return to work.

Integral Framework
Interior Exterior Leadership

Reflective Practice Individual Collective Good Ancestory Strategic Thinking

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Strategic Thinking Generating Options What might happen?

Options

Strategic Decision Making Making choices What will we do?

Decisions

Strategic Planning Taking Action How will we do it?

Actions

Long term Uncertain Divergent Incomplete Beyond linear Disrupting alignment

Short term Logical

Convergent
Pragmatic Deductive

Creating Alignment

Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking is about developing strategy. Strategy is about the future.
ergo Strategic Thinking is thinking about the future.

Strategic Thinking
Integrating the future into your decision making processes today by thinking big, deep and long.

 Big do we understand how we connect and interact with other organisations and the external environment?

 Deep how deeply are we questioning our ways of operating? Do we operate from our interpretation of the past, or our anticipation of the future? Are our assumptions today valid into the future?

 Long how far into the future are we looking? Do we understand the shape of alternative futures for our organisation?

 Strategic thinking is identifying, imagining and understanding possible and plausible future operating environments for your organisation

and using that knowledge to expand your thinking about your potential future options

about how to position your organisation effectively in the external environment,

in order to make better informed decisions about action to take today.

Thinking Big: Thinking in Systems

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking

Leaders need to learn to see the larger systems of which they are a part. Shifts focus from optimising their piece of the puzzle to building shared understanding and larger vision.

Peter Senge, The Necessary Revolution, 2008

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking

Forces your attention:
out to the external environment to understand the impact of change, on connections and interdependencies, on aligning internal capacity with reality of a constantly changing external environment, on identifying strategy that will ensure viability of your organisations into the future, and on the big picture.

Thinking Deep

Worldview
What might seem real to you probably wont seem as real to the next person.
not right, not wrong, just is.

How you filter information (your lens) to create meaning is critical to understand.

Our assumptions encase us in the past.

Assumption 1: Its impossible.

Assumption 2: Im too busy.

Assumption 3: Its irrelevant.

You will know when to test assumptions when the pain of continuing with business-as-usual is greater than the fear of challenging yourself and others.

Thinking Long: Environmental Scanning

In education
Creating graduates for jobs that dont exist, using technology that hasnt been invented, to solve problems that havent happened.
Must understand the shape of this world to be able to lead towards it.

The External Environment

Wild card

Globalisation
Global Wild card Industry Learning Educational Gaming Online Technology

Demographics & generational change

Wild card Lifestyle

Environment

Organisation Sustainability Engagement Values Vocational Imperative Funding

Economy Politics

Wild card

UNCERTAINTY
High Usual Planning Timeframe (3-5 years)

The linear future is the one we believe to be true, usually based on untested assumptions Trend Linear Future Low Today TIME Future

UNCERTAINTY
High Usual Planning Timeframe (3-5 years)

Possible Futures

Trend Linear Future Low Today TIME Future

UNCERTAINTY
High

Anddont forget the wildcard

Usual Planning Timeframe (3-5 years)

Possible Futures

Trend Linear Future Low Today TIME Future

Trends

Whatever takes you away from conventional thinking

Emerging Issues

The weird and unimaginable

Scan: know earlier

Scan actively Scan in strange places Scan for diversity of perspectives (not right, not wrong, just is) Look for connections, collisions and intersections. RSS feeds Meta scanning sites

Scan: know together

Collective wisdom is best when interpreting scanning results. Need systems to record and share scanning hits. Need regular gatherings at all levels to interpret and explore what it all means for your organisation. Get your whole organisation thinking.

Putting it all together: What might be and what can we do about it today?

There are no future facts

Types of Futures
Wildcard Scenario

Possible

Plausible Probable Preferable

Today

Time
Futures Cone developed by Clem Bezold

 What will be the shape of the future?

What will be important? What will be peripheral? What does it mean for us?

 The future might be unknowable, but you can understand a lot about what will influence the future.

The impact of global trends...

and of government policy

Competing for talent Skilling, re-skilling, up-skilling Flexibility Relationships

Increasing competition or more collaboration?

Global 2.0 is hereunderstanding and engaging with an array of cultures

Diversity of workforce and student population increasing

...student choice and time, place and pace of learning

how will we learn?

SNACK CULTURE

Deconstructing products - smaller, faster, cheaper

Is the singularity real?

Photo: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com

How will automation affect our work?

The way we do business is changing.

and we need to demonstrate our green credentials

Implications
Students how will they learn, what will their experience look like? Staff how will you work, what will a day look like for you? The organisation how will it have changed? How will it have stayed the same? Learning what will it mean (structure, delivery, assessment, recognition)? Industry what will it look like? How will people work? What skills might be needed?

Why do it this way?

Beyond the short-term Beyond busy We want to be proactive
But, you cant be proactive unless you have spent time thinking about how you might react to events that have not yet happened.

Reactive Futures

Proactive Futures

Reactive Futures seek certainty

Proactive futures embrace complexity

REACTIVE FUTURES Lets get someone to tell us about the future of

PROACTIVE FUTURES Lets think about how to focus our organisations on the future.

Reactive Futures What has happened? What caused it to happen?

Proactive Futures What is happening? What is driving the trends that will influence our future?

What are our alternative futures?

How do we respond? What ought we do today?

What would be the long term consequences of our actions today?

What will we do? What will we do?

After the event

Anticipating the event

Recognise the blinders

Mental filters (patterned responses) Overconfidence (far too certain) Penchant for confirming rather than disconfirming evidence Dislike for ambiguity (want certainty) Group think (Abilene effect)
PJH Schoemaker and GS Day Driving through the Fog, Long Range Planning 37 (2003): 127-142

Its about changing the way you think

Moving beyond pattern response and habitual thinking that no longer works well when uncertainty is dominant. Re-training our brains to make new connections (ie be creative). Moving our brains from automatic pilot to manual steering.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

 What assumptions that underpin how you think about your work now will need to change?

A Challenge: Beyond Busy

 The pressures of his job drive the manager to be superficial in his actions to overload himself with work, encourage interruption, respond quickly to every stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the abstract, makes decisions in small increments, and do everything abruptly.
Henry Mintzberg The Managers Job: Folklore or Fact, HBR, 1975

 Managers who get caught in the trap of overwhelming demands become prisoners of routine. They do not have time to notice opportunities. Their habituated work prevents them from taking the first necessary step toward harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to dream an idea into existence and transforming it into a concrete existence.
Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time, HBSP, 2004

The Result?
Our organisations will tend to be purposeless wastelands, populated by the perpetually busy and the inherently unhappy.

Stephen Johnson, What do you do for a living?, 2007

 Im too busy dealing with today to think about the future

actually means
I can only think short term, not long term. I dont have time to think strategically.

If you succumb to the busyness syndrome, this is how you approach the future.

 A futures thinking approach may mitigate against falling into the trap of being caught reacting to the day to day, where the urgent drives out the important, where the futures goes unexplored and the capacity to act, rather than the capacity to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure for leadership.
Brent Davies Leading the Strategically Focused School: Success and Sustainability (2006)

To think strategically, you have to move beyond busy.

Characteristics of Strategic Thinkers

Open mind

Systems thinker

Accept diversity

Think outside the box

Think outrageously at times

Curious

Explore, learn, reflect

Optimistic about creating the future

Challenge assumptions

Aware of own worldview

Are compassionate

and generous

and, seek and foster collective wisdom

Your turn
Focus: critical issue/decision today Scan: two trends likely to affect your decision into the future (think uncertainty not predictability) Interpret: think about how these trends might play out over the next 10 years Imagine: how your organisation look like in 10 years image/metaphor/book or movie title Decision: implications/options for your decision today. What will be the same, what might you do differently?

Back to Work

 Strategic thinking is thinking about the future. As leaders in organisations, your responsibility is to influence others to understand the imperative of the future.

The imperative of the future

That a sustainable way of life for us as individuals, for our organisations, our societies and our planet is possible only if we integrate the future into our decision making today.

The imperative of the future

We focus on immediate needs and problems and are trapped by this illusion that what is most tangible is most real. We've been conditioned for thousands of years to identify with our family, our tribe, and our local social structures. A future that asks us to overcome this condition and identify with all of humankind looks alien indeed...we've never before lived in a world in which one's actions, through global business, can have their primary consequence of the other side of the world.
Peter Senge Creating Desired Futures in a Global Community, SOL, 2003

And, just how do I do this in real life?

Its a challenge!

The gap between reactive and proactive futures is bridged by making time for strategic thinking..

Individual Foresight
Individuals recognise and build their foresight capacity

Strategic Foresight
conscious
Individuals begin to talk about and use futures approaches in their work

unconscious

implicit
Collective individual capacities generate organisational capacity (structures & processes)

explicit

solitary

collective

YOU
Interior Reflective Practice Commit to building time to do this daily stop doing something else if you have to Exterior Leadership Make a change in your routine when you go back to work. Individual

Collective Good Ancestory Recognise the impact of decisions today for future generations Strategic Thinking Whenever you have to make a decision, ask: Am I thinking, big, deep and long?

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Interior Reflective Practice Encourage and support an outward looking staff

Exterior

YOUR ORGANISATION

Leadership Build a scanning system to inform decision making and pay attention to it Individual

Collective Good Ancestory Create a futures focused decision making culture Strategic Thinking

Have thinking workshops as well as planning workshops

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

How do you know when?

Strategy framework defined by tomorrows strategic issues rather than todays operations. Strategic thinking capabilities are widespread in the organisation (not just senior executives). Process for negotiating trade-offs is in place. Performance review system focuses managers on key strategic issues Reward system and values promote and support the exercise of strategic thinking.
Adapted from Thinking Strategically, McKinsey Quarterly, June 2000

 Strategic Thinking = integrating the future into your decision making today.

Futures focused decision making = am I thinking big, deep and long?

 The aim is to understand - as best we can - the long term context of our decisions today, so that we make those decisions as wise and as robust as is possible.

Maree Conway Thinking Futures http://www.thinkingfutures.net http://futuresthink.blogspot.com maree.conway@thinkingfutures.net

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