Content area
Full Text
The need to create a capability for strategic thinking at multiple organizational levels has increasingly been recognized as central to creating and sustaining competitive advantage in the face of the rapid environmental change that characterizes many business environments today. Traditional approaches to strategic planning have been argued by influential theorists like Henry Mintzberg and Gary Hamel to be inhospitable to the type of strategic thinking so urgently needed today. Strategic thinking, as these authors have described it, is creative, disruptive, future-focused, and experimental in nature. As such, its development and expression are rarely encouraged in the often bureaucratic, financially driven, incrementally focused approaches to planning evident in many organizations today. This view-while intuitively compelling-raises an important question worthy of further scrutiny: If strategic planning is what we have, and strategic thinking is what we need, can the former be reformed to produce the latter? Do we risk, in our denunciations of current planning processes, "throwing out the baby with the bath water?"
Answering this question requires that we be more precise both in describing what constitutes strategic thinking and in examining the conditions that help support its development. We can then relate these elements to traditional views of strategic planning and look for the possibilities that exist to link the two.
Defining Strategic Thinking
Attention to defining more specifically what the concept of strategic thinking looks like in practice has been surprisingly limited, given the concept's popularity and frequency of use. Its most vocal proponents tend to talk more about what it is not (that is, traditional strategic planning) than what it is. Review of the writings that utilize the concept, however, suggests five major attributes of strategic thinking in practice. These include:
A systems or holistic view. Strategic thinking is built on the foundation of a systems perspective. A strategic thinker has a mental model of the complete end-to-end system of value creation, his or her role within it, and an understanding of the interdependencies it contains. Like the Disney World street sweeper profiled in Tom Peter's popular "In Search of Excellence" video, he sees his job not as the sum of its specific tasks, but as a contribution to a larger system that produces outcomes of value for customers.
A focus on intent....