Strategic Thinking: what it is and how to do it

Strategic Thinking and Planning for Tertiary Education

ATEM NSW/ACT

Maree Conway

July 2009

1990-2004 (i) Faculty Assistant Registrar Business, (ii) Divisional Manager, Arts, Humanities & Soc. Sci. (iii) Divisional Manager, Policy and Planning, (iv) Director, Foresight and Planning, and (v) Director, Foresight, Planning and Review

1978-1980 casual jobs as a student, Graduate ClerkSchool of Humanities

1981-84 Student Records Officer,Footscray College of TAFE

1986-1989 Student Admin Services Officer at Chisholm Institute of Technology, then Student Administration Manager,Monash, Caulfield AND Secondment as School Executive Officer, School of Physics at La Trobe 1988

2005-2007 General Manager, Quality, Information and Planning

1984-1986 Volunteer at University YWCA, Berkeley

1980-1981•La Trobe AcademicBoard Secretariat•Government Information Unit,Commonwealth Govt

2007….integrating long term thinking into strategy development, using futures approaches

Reflective Practice

Leadership

Good Ancestory

Interior Exterior

Individual

Collective

Strategic Thinking

Integral Leadership Framework

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Strategic ThinkingGenerating Options

What might happen?

Strategic Decision MakingMaking choices

What will we do?

Strategic PlanningTaking Action

How will we do it?

Options

Decisions

Actions

Long term

Uncertain

Divergent

Incomplete

Beyond linear

Disrupting alignment

Short term

Logical

Convergent

Pragmatic

Deductive

Alignment

• Integrating the future into your decision making processes today by thinking big, deep and long.

Strategic Thinking

• Big – do we understand how we connect and interact with other organisations and the external environment, both local and global?

• Deep – how deeply are we questioning our ways of operating?

• Do we operate from our interpretation of the past, or our anticipation of the future?

• Are our assumptions today valid into the future?

• Long – how far into the future are we looking? Do we understand the shape of alternative futures for our organisation?

Thinking Big: Thinking in Systems

• Leaders need to learn to see the larger systems of which they are a part.

• Shifts focus from optimising their piece of the puzzle to building shared understanding and larger vision.

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking

Peter Senge, The Necessary Revolution, 2008

• Forces your attention on:– the external environment to understand the

impact of change,– connections and interdependencies,– aligning internal capacity with reality of a

constantly changing external environment,– identifying strategy that will ensure viability of

your organisations into the future.

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking

Thinking Deep

• What might seem real to you probably won’t seem as real to the next person.– not right, not wrong, just is.

• How you filter information (your lens) to create meaning is critical to understand.

• Underpins our assumptions about what is real and what is not.

Worldview

Our assumptions encase us in the past.

Assumption 1: It’s impossible.

Assumption 2: I’m too busy.

Assumption 3: It’s irrelevant.

You will know when to test assumptions when the pain of continuing with ‘business-as-usual’ is greater than the fear of challenging yourself and others.

Thinking Long: Environmental Scanning

• Creating graduates for jobs that don’t exist, using technology that hasn’t been invented, to solve problems that we don’t know about yet.

• Must understand the shape of this world to be able to lead towards it.

In education…

OrganisationOrganisation

Global

Industry

Technology

Lifestyle

Values

Politics

Economy

Environment

Demographics &generational change

Learning

Educational Gaming

Funding

Engagement

Online

Sustainability

VocationalImperative

The External Environment

GlobalisationWildcard

Wildcard

Wildcard

Wildcard

Today FutureTIME

UNCERTAINTY

Linear Future

Low

High

The linear future is the one we believe to be true, usually based on untested assumptions

Usual Planning Timeframe(3-5 years)

Trend

Today FutureTIME

UNCERTAINTY

Linear Future

Low

High

Possible Futures

Usual Planning Timeframe(3-5 years)

Trend

Today FutureTIME

UNCERTAINTY

Linear Future

Low

High

Possible Futures

Usual Planning Timeframe(3-5 years)

Trend

And…don’t forget the wildcard…

Whatever takes you away from conventional thinking…

Trends

Emerging Issues

The weird and unimaginable

• Scan actively

• Scan in strange places

• Scan for diversity of perspectives (not right, not wrong, just is)

Scan: know earlier

• Look for connections, collisions

and intersections.

• Collective wisdom.

• Record and share scanning ‘hits.

• Gather regularly to explore.

• Get your whole organisation thinking.

• Do it often, not once.

Scan: know together

• Strategic thinking is identifying, imagining and understanding possible and plausible future operating environments for your organisation…

…and using that knowledge to expand your thinking about your potential future options…

…about how to position your organisation effectively in the external environment,

…in order to make better informed decisions about action to take today.

Putting it all together:What might be… and what can

we do about it today?

There are no future facts

Types of Futures

Time

Today

Possible

Plausible

Probable

Preferable

Scenario

“Wildcard”

Futures Cone developed by Clem Bezold

• What will be the shape of the future?

• What will be important?

• What will be peripheral?

• What does it mean for us?

• The future might be unknowable, but you can understand a lot about what will influence the future.

The impact of global trends...

…and of government policy

Competing for talent

Skilling, re-skilling, up-skilling

Flexibility

Relationships

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/08/are-you-a-synth.html

Demographics

Genetic Engineering

Consumer Trends

Global 2.0 is here…understanding and engaging with an array of cultures…

Diversity of workforce and student population increasing

...student choice and time, place and pace of learning

…how will we learn?

SNACK CULTURE

Deconstructing products - smaller, faster, cheaper

Photo: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com

Is the singularity real?

How will automation affect our work?

3D PRINTING

Moving to personalised production www.ponoko.comwww.shapeways.com

The way we do business is changing.

…and we need to demonstrate our ‘green’ credentials

Implications• Students – how will they learn, what will their

experience look like? What will they expect?• Staff – how will you work, what will a day look like

for you? What will you expect of your employer?• The organisation – how will it have changed?

How will it have stayed the same?• Learning – what will it mean (structure, delivery,

assessment, recognition)?• Industry – what will it look like? How will people

work? What skills might be needed?

• Focus: critical issue/decision today• Scan: two trends likely to affect your decision into

the future (think uncertainty not predictability)• Interpret: think about how these trends might play

out over the next 10 years• Imagine: how your organisation look like in 10

years – image/metaphor/book or movie title• Decision: – implications/options for your decision

today. What will be the same, what might you do differently?

Your turn…

• Beyond the short-term

• Beyond busy

• “We want to be proactive…”

• But, you can’t be proactive unless you have spent time thinking about how you might react to events that have not yet happened.

Why do it this way?

Unless you take the time to think strategically, you will always be in crisis management mode and always putting out bushfires.

Reactive Futures

Proactive Futures

Reactive Futures – assumes linear future

Proactive futures – assumes uncertainty

• Let’s think about how to focus our organisations on the future.

Reactive Futures Proactive Futures

What has happened? What is happening?

What caused it to happen? What is driving the trends that will influence our future?

What are our alternative futures?

How do we respond? What ought we do today?

What would be the long term consequences of our actions today?

What will we do now? What will we do now?

After the event Anticipating the event

• Mental filters (patterned responses)

• Overconfidence (far too certain)

• Penchant for confirming rather than disconfirming evidence (we miss things)

• Dislike for ambiguity (want certainty)

• Group think (Abilene effect)

Recognise the blinders

PJH Schoemaker and GS Day Driving through the Fog, Long Range Planning 37 (2003): 127-142

• Moving beyond pattern response and habitual thinking that no longer works well when uncertainty is dominant.

• Re-training our brains to make new connections and generate new ideas.

• Moving our brains from automatic pilot to manual steering.

It’s about changing the way you think…

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

• What assumptions that underpin how you think about your work now will need to change?

A Challenge: Beyond Busy

• The pressures of his job drive the manager to be superficial in his actions - to overload himself with work, encourage interruption, respond quickly to every stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the abstract, makes decisions in small increments, and do everything abruptly.

Henry Mintzberg The Manager’s Job: Folklore or Fact, HBR, 1975

• “Managers who get caught in the trap of overwhelming demands become prisoners of routine. They do not have time to notice opportunities. Their habituated work prevents them from taking the first necessary step toward harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to dream an idea into existence and transforming it into a concrete existence.”

Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time, HBSP, 2004

The Result?

Our organisations will tend to be purposeless wastelands, populated by the perpetually busy and the inherently unhappy.

Stephen Johnson, What do you do for a living?, 2007

• I’m too busy dealing with today to think about the future…

actually means…

• I can only think short term. I don’t have time to think strategically.

• A futures thinking approach may mitigate against falling into the trap of being caught reacting to the day to day, where the urgent drives out the important, where the futures goes unexplored and the capacity to act, rather than the capacity to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure for leadership.

Brent Davies

Leading the Strategically Focused School: Success and Sustainability (2006)

If you succumb to the busyness syndrome, this is how you approach the future.

To think strategically, you have to move beyond busy.

Characteristics of Strategic Thinkers

Open mind…

Systems thinker…

Accept diversity…

Think outside the box…

Think outrageously at times…

Curious…

Explore, learn, reflect

Optimistic about creating the future…

Challenge assumptions…

Aware of own worldview…

Are compassionate…

…and generous

…and, seek and foster collective wisdom

Back to Work

• Strategic thinking is thinking about the future.

• As leaders in organisations, your responsibility is to influence others to understand the imperative of the future.

• That a sustainable way of life for us as individuals, for our organisations, our societies and our planet is possible only if we integrate the future into our decision making today.

The imperative of the future

And, just how do I do this in real life?

It’s a challenge!

The gap between reactive and proactive strategy is bridged by making time for

strategic thinking.

Individual

Foresight

unconscious

implicit

solitary

Strategic

Foresight

conscious

explicit

collective

Individuals recognise and build their foresight capacity

Individuals begin to talk about and use futures approaches in their work

Collective individual capacities generate organisational capacity (structures & processes)

Leadership

Make a change in your routine when you go back to work.

Good Ancestory

Recognise the impact of decisions today for future

generations

Strategic Thinking

Whenever you have to make a decision, ask: “Am I

thinking, big, deep and long?”

Interior Exterior

Individual

Collective

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Reflective Practice

Commit to building time to do this daily – stop doing

something else if you have to

YOU

Leadership

Build a scanning system to inform decision making – and

pay attention to it

Good Ancestory

Create a futures focused decision making culture

Strategic Thinking

Have thinking workshops as well as planning workshops

Interior Exterior

Individual

Collective

Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Reflective Practice

Encourage and support an outward looking staff

YOU AS A LEADER

Make space to think

“Strategic thinking can be colloquially defined as "acting in the present with a clear sense of the future"- a sense of what the future environment might be, and a vision of what you want the future organization to be. No aspect of cultural change is more important than focusing organizational values and behavior on the future.”

http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/seminars/futurizing/focusing.html

• Strategy framework defined by tomorrow’s strategic issues rather than today’s operations.

• Strategic thinking capabilities are widespread in the organisation (not just senior executives).

• Process for negotiating trade-offs is in place.• Performance review system focuses managers

on key strategic issues.• Reward system and values promote and support

the exercise of strategic thinking.

How do you know when?

Adapted from Thinking Strategically, McKinsey Quarterly, June 2000

• The aim is to understand - as best we can - the long term context of our decisions today, so that we make those decisions as wise and as robust as is possible today.

Maree ConwayThinking Futures

http://www.thinkingfutures.nethttp://futuresthink.blogspot.com

maree.conway@thinkingfutures.net

Photos from fotolia.com and istockphoto.com