By Jocelyne F. Lafrenière

Strategic thinking is a complimentary and crucial process that goes hand-in-hand with strategic planning. It gets you to think outside the box and look at the bigger picture. It moves you to your destination with more ease as it allows you to understand what works and does not work, look at emerging opportunities and barriers, analyze influential factors, get your team engaged, choose the right direction and interventions, and invest resources at the right time. On the other hand, strategic planning ensures the actions are well aligned with the business direction resulting from strategic thinking.

So many businesses have found themselves under-performing because of a lack of strategic thinking. They failed to be creative and intuitive. They failed to evolve and react promptly. Strategic thinking is all about intuition, creativity, enquiry, analysis and innovation. It’s an on-going process that is exciting, participative and useful to setting the core strategies.

For some leaders and managers, planning is viewed as a boring and unproductive exercise because they simply don’t understand the game of success. Their annual planning exercise is strictly limited to taking last year’s budget and increasing it by an unrealistic percentage, without asking the real questions about their internal and external environment. Management simply hopes the wind will turn in their favor. This approach is called pathetic planning that will lead you to failure and will leave your team totally demotivated.

My three step approach to strategic thinking – inquire, analyze and strategize – is ideal to give new life to your business. You should start the strategic thinking process six to eight months before the start of a new fiscal year.

Inquire:

 -  Understand your clients, targets and relevant stakeholders’ needs.
 -  Look at attractive adjacent markets and emerging opportunities.
 -  Enquire about economic and community changes.
 -  Anticipate shifts, risks, emerging barriers.
 -  Look at what your competitors are doing.
 -  Listen to your team as they have eyes for internal and external hazards.

Analyze:
 -  Assess required resources (material, financial and human).
 -  Review your internal structure and accountability framework.
 -  Review current pricing and marketing strategies.
 -  Review operations and processes.
 -  Challenge ideas and analyze options.

Strategize:

 - Set the enterprise’s vision, mission, purpose and values.
-  Identify long-term strategic outcome-oriented goals to achieve the vision.
-  Determine mid-term strategic objectives to achieve long-term strategic goals.
-  Identify strategies and tactical plans  to achieve mid-term strategic objectives.

So now, get into the habits of strategic thinkers. Enquire, analyze and strategize. This will help you move up to a new level of success. See you at the top!