The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The implication is that you cannot assess your organization’s rapidly shifting realities if you have crippling biases in collecting and interpreting information. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as the aphorism so aptly puts it. You will not accurately identify poten tial threats and opportunities and use these insights to envision and enact the right course of action for your company. Clearly, you must learn to recognize and avoid common cognitive biases. But that’s not enough. Beyond “debiasing” yourself, you must also develop c​ritical-​thinking skills that focus and test your p​attern-​recognition abilities. In a novel situation with high stakes, you must be intentional in critiquing your ini tial perceptions of the situation. Cognitive biases can obscure important realities, causing us to see what we want to see. The best strategic thinkers are sceptical about their intuitions and challenge everyone’s convictions. Leaders like Woods tend to choose paths that advance their plans and goals; however, pattern recognition can also indicate that you need to adjust course to respond to what is happening around you. Continuous adaptation is a hallmark of great strategic thinkers. As inWoods’s case, it often starts with an open ​discussion – ​ the right environment for strategic thinking to flourish. Best practice includes discussing the potential implications with diverse teams, who will offer a variety of viewpoints and experiences that can improve ​problem-​solving and ​decision-​making. The discussion can, for example, highlight problems with your mental model, such as when new observations contradict your original assessment of the business landscape, rendering a strategic plan unreliable. You can collect more information and revise your assumptions to make better judgements. Through this process of critiquing and correcting, strategic thinkers can test and improve the fruits of pattern recognition.

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