The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

Simulation is another powerful way to enhance your ​pattern-​ recognition abilities. By exposing yourself to situations like those you encounter in the real world, for example through participa tion in business simulations, you can improve your situational awareness, pattern recognition and even strategic planning and execution. Simulations are an excellent way to train those ​all-​ important mental processes that enable us to think critically and strategically and make better choices. Good feedback is also a powerful tool for developing your​ pattern-​recognition abilities. Research shows that when people are given detailed performance feedback after completing a task, they rapidly converge on the optimal ​trade-​off between speed and accuracy in ​decision-​making. 15 That’s because feedback pro vides reference points and reinforces associations between cues and strategies, helping you to develop the mental models that enable rapid ​decision-​making in uncertain environments with incomplete information. Through feedback, executives can also test their convictions and overcome the cognitive limitations and biases that often lead to poor decisions and bad outcomes. Summary Pattern recognition is an important aspect of strategic thinking because it enables you to identify patterns and trends in data and information. This allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your operations, markets and c​ustomers – ​and to identify poten tial challenges and opportunities. If you can’t recognize essential patterns in the most important domains in which your business operates, you have no hope of focusing on what matters and developing good strategies. So work on strengthening your​ pattern-​recognition capabilities through immersion, observation

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