Thinking Strategically Will Help You Get Ahead and Stay Ahead

Create mental space for new ideas to kick in. Without the quiet time to sit with your thoughts, facing the uncomfortable silence, and letting your mind wander away, you cannot draw useful connections.

Spend time learning about your business and industry. Meet with other functions within your organization to understand how they operate, what their challenges are and how they make decisions. All of this knowledge will enable you to apply different mental models to connect ideas from different domains thereby expanding your circle of competence and building your strategic thinking skills.

While a good strategy is important to get started, a strategy by itself won’t get you anywhere. You need both strategies “the intent” and tactics “putting that intent to action.”

• Break down your strategy into the specific things you need to do.
• Plan what day of the week, and what specific time of the day you are actually going to give life to your strategy. To make sure you don’t let things slip by, or fail to grab the right opportunities, plan these activities on your calendar.
• Don’t let lack of time or other excuses be the reason for inaction. Plan your time to make things happen.

To embrace a strategic thinking mindset, don’t work in silos. Find people around you that you can trust, respect or admire.

Exchange your ideas with them, request them to challenge your thinking, enable them to ask you tough and uncomfortable questions.

You can’t build a strategic thinking muscle unless you audit your outcomes, inquire about other opinions and adapt to the changes around you.

The world is changing very fast and you need to adapt your thinking to the demands of the tomorrow and not the expectations from the past.