Strategic thinking is defined as a mental or thinking
process applied by an individual in the context of achieving a goal or set of
goals in a game or other endeavor. As a cognitive activity, it produces
thought.
When applied in an organizational strategic management
process, strategic thinking involves the generation and application of unique
business insights and opportunities intended to create competitive advantage
for a firm or organization. It can be done individually, as well as
collaboratively among key people who can positively alter an organization's
future. Group strategic thinking may create more value by enabling a proactive
and creative dialogue, where individuals gain other people's perspectives on
critical and complex issues. This is regarded as a benefit in highly
competitive and fast-changing business landscapes.
Strategic thinking includes finding and developing a
strategic foresight capacity for an organization, by exploring all possible
organizational futures, and challenging conventional thinking to foster
decision making today. Recent strategic thought points ever more clearly
towards the conclusion that the critical strategic question is not the
conventional "What?", but "Why?" or "How?". The
work of Henry Mintzberg and other authors, further support the conclusion; and
also draw a clear distinction between strategic thinking and strategic
planning, another important strategic management thought process.
General Andre Beaufre wrote in 1963 that strategic thinking
"is a mental process, at once abstract and rational, which must be capable
of synthesizing both psychological and material data. The strategist must have
a great capacity for both analysis and synthesis; analysis is necessary to
assemble the data on which he makes his diagnosis, synthesis in order to
produce from these data the diagnosis itself—and the diagnosis in fact amounts
to a choice between alternative courses of action."
There is no generally accepted definition for strategic
thinking, no common agreement as to its role or importance, and no standardised
list of key competencies of strategic thinkers. There is also no consensus on
whether strategic thinking is an uncommon ideal or a common and observable
property of strategy. Most agree that traditional models of strategy making,
which are primarily based on strategic planning, are not working. Strategy in
today's competitive business landscape is moving away from the basic ‘strategic
planning’ to more of ‘strategic thinking’ in order to remain competitive.
However, both thought processes must work hand-in-hand in
order to reap maximum benefit. It has been argued that the real heart of
strategy is the 'strategist'; and for a better strategy execution requires a
strategic thinker who can discover novel, imaginative strategies which can
re-write the rules of the competitive game; and set in motion the chain of
events that will shape and "define the future".
There are many tools and techniques to promote and
discipline strategic thinking. The flowchart to the right provides a process
for classifying a phenomenon as a scenario in the intuitive logics tradition,
and how it differs from a number of other planning approaches.
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