Five Strategic Thinking Skills

Activate Team Training

This content is a part of the Activate Team Training course. View the full course overview here.

Strategic Thinking as a core capability

As the pace of change accelerates, individuals and organizations need to cultivate strategic thinking as a core capability, a mindset for embracing change, seeing opportunities and ongoing reinvention. Strategic thinking skills are a meta skill set – learning how to learn, to cultivate openness to change, and resilience under pressure. These 5 strategic thinking methods are grounded in innovation principles, and enable teams to focus on what matters, to dynamically find and solve the right problem, to bring others in, and to learn by doing.

Agile in Action

I have captured the best of innovation practices into 5 “ATE’s” – Situate, Iterate, Calibrate, Liberate and Collaborate.

These 5 methods are the strategic expression of the best of lean and design thinking techniques.  

They do not come with any inherent or unnecessary complexity, or ‘must do’. These strategic thinking lenses take up just enough space to learn from - they are an inspiration and a springboard for your team to apply robust innovation thinking to your team’s priorities.

SITUATE

 Involves understanding, and focusing on what matters

Involves connecting the dots up to strategy; understanding how a piece fits into the bigger picture and creating the clarity required for productive action

ITERATE

Involves an experimental mindset, using questions and tests to sharpen your idea or strategy

Strategy is a fluid process of making choices, assessing, and creating greater clarity with each pass

CALIBRATE

Involves making investments that are proportionate to the level of clarity that exists; investments of time, talent and energy.

Involves placing bigger and bigger bets as you learn more

LIBERATE

Involves going beyond known possibilities, using divergent thinking approaches to explore unseen possibilities

COLLABORATE

Involves bringing new people and new ideas into the thinking process;

Involves creating productive spaces to collaborate on solving problems and generating solutions.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Aristotle