The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

differentiates the good leader. Not many people have that. Not many people can predict that corner.” 4 Strong strategic thinkers process vast quantities of informa tion to make rapid, effective judgements about what’s essential in the complex business landscape. The mental models they have developed in l​ong-​term memory also allow them to perceive weak but important signals in a sea of noise. As a result, they can make decisions based on incomplete information, and in the face of great uncertainty. To be a great strategic thinker, you must therefore strive to develop powerful mental models of what is happening in the most critical domains of your business. Doing so will help you process more information without stretching your cognitive processing capacity so thinly that you lose focus or get confused. Research shows that information overload saps our energy and​ self-​control, impairs ​decision-​making ability and makes us less collaborative. 5 To develop your ​pattern-​recognition abilities, it helps to understand that your brain has two basic “systems” of thinking, as described by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in a Scientific American excerpt of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow : The capabilities of System 1 include innate skills that we share with other animals. We are born prepared to per ceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders. Other mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice. 6

System 1 operates in the background, quickly and naturally, with little conscious thought. But it’s prone to bias and error. System 2

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