Strategic Thinking Requires Time (Strategy Series 3/3)

July 6, 2022 Regina Zafonte

How much of your time in your calendar is dedicated to strategy and long-term planning? In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% said that being strategic was the most important leadership behavior to their organization’s success. Yet, it is not being done.

Common challenges leaders have in finding time for strategic planning:

1. Short-term focused. Most leaders want to spend more time on strategy but one challenge that keeps them from the practice is being too enmeshed in the near term. Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found that 96% of leaders surveyed claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking because they were too busy putting out fires. Some leaders do not know how to step away from the whirlwind. For example, Lisa, an HR Vice President, explained how she approached her job in a transactional manner, simply aiming to get the next hire and not recognizing that she needed an entirely new approach to recruitment and retention for a fast-growing company. To do the latter effectively, she needed to step away from her workload and short-term hiring goals to create the think time to rework defective processes and devise a more scalable system that will allow her to streamline the hiring process that will eventually save significant time in the long run.

2. Poor email management. The volume of emails keeps leaders focused on immediate and sometimes low-priority concerns. According to a Radicati Group analysis, we receive an average of 126 emails per day. I have some executive clients who receive 400+ emails. If you were to categorize your emails, which ones are truly valuable and which ones are time sucks? How much time do you spend on emails? How much time do you want to spend? How is your time on emails serving your long-term goals? What’s your plan to free yourself from this time-consuming activity?

3. Failure to prioritize and delegate. When you create a jam-packed schedule and are running from meeting to meeting, you cannot contribute strategically without adequate time to reflect on the issues and consider all the options. What meetings do you need to deprioritize? How can you delegate so you do not have to be at all places at all times? Our routine can put a damper on strategy time, so how can you reallocate your time to prioritize the unfamiliar and non-routine activities to increase your capacity to act more strategically? In a ten-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. Trying to do everything yourself is a sure path to limiting your leadership and that of others because they do not have the chance to grow.

4. Falling into the competency trap. This is when you continue to do a previous task related to execution because you do it well, enjoy it, and get a confidence boost because you are accumulating expertise in that one task. The problem is that while you are doing that work, you might be neglecting the other activities such as strategic planning and setting vision and direction, which are skills more needed by the business. What produced your past successes likely will be different than the future wins you will need to succeed. Indeed, you can deliver amazing work on the wrong things and it will go unnoticed. If you are in stage 3 of your leadership but still doing stage 2 work, it is time to depart from your comfort zone and exercise new strategic muscles.

To avoid some of these challenges, create space in your schedule:

Strategic thinking does not necessarily mean numerous sabbaticals or extensive leadership retreats but is more about carving out consistent space. As productivity expert David Allen shared in an interview with Dorie Clark for her book Stand Out, “You don’t need time to have a good idea, you need space…. It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.”

Once you find that calendar time, some executives may not know how to begin their strategic thinking time. I find that some of my clients put too much pressure on themselves believing they must begin with states of enlightenment that yield novel insights, but it can start much smaller.

Here are some things you can do during your protected strategetic and think time sessions:

1. You can distinguish the urgent from the important. Stephen Covey’s 2 x 2 matrix is helpful for this in separating more immediate needs from longer and more meaningful work. Where do you want to have an impact? What will it take to achieve success? How will the organization evolve to meet challenges on the horizon? These are the kinds of deep, foundational questions that are best addressed with long-term planning.

2. Think with others to get an outside perspective. Reach out to other departments or build rapport with leaders, managers, front-line team members, and customers to listen and understand their roles, concerns, and ideas. This will add to your knowledge bank of all parts of the organization to better utilize those insights in your projects to ensure alignment with the corporate strategy from the outstart. You can also think about how to use other partners for new initiatives and create win-win experiences. As you develop these relationships, you will learn more elements of the business and know which key individuals to call when you want to brainstorm or move past an obstacle. It would help if you also were proactive about connecting with peers outside your organization and in your industry to understand their observations. You can share your ideas across your network for greater meaning-making.

3. Expand your cross-functional learning. When you understand more about all areas of the organization and know who all the key players are, each project you work on becomes a puzzle. When you move pieces, you can see how it affects others either directly or indirectly. When you consider the impacts of your decisions on all company domains, you see the big picture more clearly. That is strategy.

4. Ask other strategic thinkers about their processes. Turn to people who have skills you admire and find out what their process is as a prime learning opportunity. You can start the conversation with, “I noticed you offer really valuable contributions in the meetings; I would love to know your process for strategic thinking? Where do you get your insights from?” You’ll be surprised how quickly others engage and what you can discover.

5. Learn. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts and interviews, and watch instructive videos and webinars to expand your thinking and learn new approaches relevant to your specific situation. There are many valuable conversations happening in your industry, especially among futurists who have spent much time thinking about these topics. How do you receive regular doses of information that can spark your own? Are there classes, industry conferences, professional gatherings, or associations that you can attend? Can you form a book group with your coworkers to have dedicated space for this type of learning? It doesn’t need to be time-intensive, even just 10 minutes of reading and 30-minute discussions can yield significant returns.

6. Take a break. It can be common to think that to accomplish your work, you must increase your hours. In fact, research by Bob Sullivan reveals that productivity decreases for those who work more than 50 hours per week. When you can let your mind wander, you can come up with great strategic ideas. Lin Manuel Miranda came up with the idea for his award-winning play Hamilton when he was on vacation with his wife fishing. You can check out my other blog on the importance of taking breaks for breakthroughs.

7. Reflect. Do you regularly ask, what’s working and what’s not? How can you chronicle your successes and failures to rethink your approach to make it even more strategic? You can develop a reflective practice that can be as little as one or five minutes that will engender tremendous value because you will be more intentional about your actions and contributions.

8. Pick a small project to experiment. Is there one project you can work on regularly to develop some of your strategic skills? You can test a hypothesis and run an experiment and once you take action, reflect on your progress and learnings and then iterate to improve even more. If you just stay in your head without taking action, you will rob yourself of the best learnings, which usually come when you try something and get immediate feedback.

9. Engage in meaning-making activities. Developing great strategic thinking skills requires you to gain exposure to key roles, synthesize broad information, participate in a culture of curiosity, and gather experiences that allow you to identify patterns and connect the dots in novel ways. That’s why leadership development programs often include job rotations, cross-functional projects, and face time with senior leadership - they accelerate your critical thinking. You can take that 30-foot view to better understand those issues that get raised over and over in different parts of the organization. Why hasn’t anybody solved them yet? What’s been the dominant approach? What’s a different approach to take?

Leaders know the value of spending time on strategic thinking, yet they are not doing it because of the challenges of short-term thinking and the urgency of trivial tasks. Start by fostering a practice for thinking and reflecting that will help you develop strategies that can bring significant benefits to you and your organization.

Quote of the day: “Get off of the dance floor and look at your operation from the balcony.” - Ron Heifetz, Harvard Professor

Q: What is your thinking and reflecting practice? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with leaders to engage in strategic thinking for them and their teams, contact me to learn more.

Top 11 Ways to Think Strategically (Strategy series 2/3)

June 21, 2022 Regina Zafonte

Have you ever been told that you need to be more strategic without giving any concrete guidance on how to do that? If this is a top visible skill that helps you climb the organizational chart, it is worth the effort to grow the ability, regardless of your current position.

Being a strategic thinker can involve the big-picture, where you are not making decisions in a vacuum. You consider the future direction, how other departments might be affected, and how the outside world could respond to your choices.

Here are some specific approaches you can take to be a more strategic or a big picture thinker:

1. Take a stakeholder-centered approach. Step outside of your silo and stand in the shoes of all those connected to and impacted by your company. Consider these perspectives:

· Go vertical (up and down). Step back and survey the landscape to see the system. You can think about the customer, direct reports, manager, skip manager, CEO, shareholders, and community – both locally and globally. Ask the question – what do these people want and need? Where are the common denominators?

· Go horizontal (left and right). How are you considering other departments in your strategy? How is it aligned with the company’s domestic and international vision? Look across to your direct competitors or beyond to other industries to collect some of the best ideas and trends to make sense of the data in terms of what it means for your team and your company.

· Use an impact lens. What will be the result of your strategy on your organization and these various stakeholders? Do the outcomes support the broader goals of the organization? What could negatively impact the results? What do business partners need to understand to ensure its success? Having some answers to these questions can help you be more thoughtful and strategic.

2. Consider the timeframe. What are you trying to do in the short-term v. long-term? What does success look like in 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? What are the early signs of success/failure? What skills and talent will it take to succeed in the long term? If you were to create a basic road map to navigate to success, what would that look like? How will you know when you have arrived? Whom do you need to support your journey?

3. Think about challenges and ask key questions. Anticipating problems and trends within your organization and industry can be immensely powerful. You may want to ask: What are the three most important challenges today? How about the most significant future challenges? How does today’s work fit into future work? This is how a commander approaches their work, they seek to understand how each battle plays a part in the larger war. What challenge would be the hardest to tackle that you cannot see right now? What challenge would be the most important or lead domino that would knock over several other dominos?

4. To be a strategic thinker, develop problem-solving skills. Most people want to offer a solution to the problem before adequately defining it. Quick fixes may seem convenient, but they often solve only the surface issues and waste resources that could otherwise be used to tackle the real cause. The 5 WHYs technique is great for getting at the root cause and preventing stubborn or recurrent problems as they are symptoms of deeper causes. It was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training. Sakichi Toyoda, the Japanese Thomas Edison and architect of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s, describes the method in his book as “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach . . . by repeating the word why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.” Today, the method is used far beyond Toyota and is popular in lean development.

Here is an example from Buffer:

1. Why did the system go down? [Because the database became locked.]

2. Why did it become locked? [Because there were too many database writes]

3. Why were we doing too many database writes? [Because this was not foreseen, and it was not load tested]

4. Why wasn’t this change load tested? [Because we don’t have a development process set up for when we should load test changes]

5. Why don’t we have a development process for when to load test? [We’ve never done too much load testing and are hitting new levels of scale.]

It is going beyond the presenting issue and symptoms to treat the root cause.

5. You can question basic assumptions. If you are discussing a long-term company strategy upon which years of effort and expense will be based, you can ask basic questions about your beliefs. How do you know that business will increase? What does the research say about your expectations about the future of the market? Have you taken the time to step into the figurative shoes of your customers as a “secret shopper?” Another way to question your assumptions is to consider alternatives. You might ask: what if our clients changed? What if our suppliers went out of business? These sorts of questions help you gain new and vital perspectives that help hone your thinking.

6. Use First principles thinking. It is the best way to reverse-engineer complicated problems and reveal creative possibilities. The idea is to break down complex problems into fundamental elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results. This approach was used by the philosopher Aristotle who defined it as the first basis from which a thing is known, and now by Elon Musk and Charlie Munger. It is about thinking like a scientist and not assuming anything; What is true and what has been proven?

Musk gave an example of how Space X uses first principles to innovate at low prices. People thought battery packs were expensive because that’s the way they have been in the past. Musk responded,

“Well, no, that’s pretty dumb… Because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing…. you can’t say, … oh, nobody wants a car because horses are great, and we’re used to them and they can eat grass and there’s lots of grass all over the place and … there’s no gasoline that people can buy. Historically, battery packs cost $600 per kilowatt-hour… So the first principles would be, … what are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents? … It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a steel can. So break that down on a material basis; if we bought that on a London Metal Exchange, what would each of these things cost? Oh, jeez, it’s … $80 per kilowatt-hour. So, clearly, you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell, and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”

First principles thinking allows you to see problems from multiple angles and interpret complex and conflicting information with curiosity and open-mindedness, and that’s what strategic thinking is all about.

7. See the rich interconnectivity. Agents can sometimes interact in ways where they fundamentally change each other and something entirely different and unpredictable emerges from the contact. Paul Cilliers used the following analogy: “a jumbo jet is complicated (it is equal to the sum of its parts), and if you had to take it apart or reverse actions, you could, mayonnaise is complex (once mixed, you can’t separate the parts again; the Interaction fundamentally changes them).” In other words, complex systems are subject to co-evolution, and once it happens, it’s irreversible. How can you factor this idea into your strategy or big-picture thinking? Which steps you choose to take will be easily reversible, and which ones are permanent? How will that impact your experiments? Knowing this information will help you thrive in a VUCA world.

8. Use Polarity Thinking. In Adam Grant’s Think Again, he talks about polarity thinking. For example, how can two great thought leaders have two different perspectives? Daniel Goleman would argue that EQ matters more than IQ as it can determine 90% of a leader’s success. In contrast, Jordan Peterson would maintain that EQ is a corporate marketing scheme; he downplays its importance. How can these two PhD holders be right if they have opposite views? Polarity thinking can allow both of them to be right, especially when thinking about context. Instead of talking about why it is important, you want to talk about WHEN it is important. EQ is beneficial with jobs that deal with perceiving and understanding emotions (customer service, counseling) but less relevant and even detrimental where emotions are less essential (mechanics, accountants). How can you apply polarity thinking or both/and approach to your business as a creative exercise?

9. Consider the 4 Cs analytical framework. Adam Brandenburger writes about contrast, combination, constraint, and context to get creative with your strategy:

· Contrast. Challenge the assumptions undergirding the status quo.

· Combination. Steve Jobs famously said that creativity is “just connecting things”; what products or services seem independent from or even in tension with one another can you link?

· Constraint. A good strategist looks at an organization’s limitations and considers how they might become strengths. A lack of resources can be a fertilizer for innovation. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was staying near Lake Geneva during an unusually cold and stormy summer and found herself trapped indoors with nothing to do but exercise her imagination. Artists are pretty familiar with limitations, from setbacks to structural ones like writing a 14-line poem. How can you take a no and turn it into a yes? A client I was coaching was trying to get a budget for a new hire and when she was told no, she remained undeterred. She came up with an internal rotation idea as a way of repurposing talent to help on other teams. This solution helped with another goal of reducing burnout and attrition because it gave other people an option of doing different work, exercising their passion, and staying engaged.

· Context. If you reflect on how a problem which is similar to yours was solved in an entirely different context, surprising insights may emerge.

10. Scenario planning. How can you lay out 3 likely scenarios, a least likely one, and a crazy one so you are prepared for as much as you can? What redundancies can you put into place so that there is support in place if one path fails? How can you anticipate what other people want and are likely to do so you can craft your response? Art Kleiner, Editor-in-Chief of PwC Global promotes the habit of mentalizing - which is thinking about what other people are thinking and instead of sharing what they want or what you want, going a step beyond to articulate what they are likely to do next.

11. Toggle. Move between the big-picture and day-to-day execution to broaden your view. As you are completing the day-to-day work, can you easily connect the work to the mission and vision? Do you know the why behind the small decisions? Similarly, in those conceptual meetings, can you move from the 1,000 feet view to the 100 to understand the next steps and road map that will allow you to ascend? Can you take a broad idea and create a plan with metrics and benchmarks while keeping the WHY top of mind?

Once you have engaged in strategic thinking, it is important to have time for reflection so you can consolidate the learnings, get clear on your point of view, and communicate your strategy so your boss knows you are a strategic thinker. Here are two helpful steps for perception management:

1. Get clear on your point of view. When you have considered and implemented the above approaches, bring a perspective to the table. Do people know where you stand? Your leaders want to know what you think, so when you show that you are considering the big-picture and can articulate your views, you can stand out for a promotion. Beyond just coming up with ideas, it’s even more powerful when you can take the initiative and show you have thought a few steps ahead of how you would implement something and put your ideas into action. Having good ideas and strategies are only the first step; you also must communicate them and bring people along.

2. Carve out prep time before your meetings. It can be too easy for us to feel like we will wing the meeting, but it is more powerful when we are deliberate. Block out 30 minutes on your calendar before essential meetings so you have time to collect your thoughts, and arrange and package your ideas into a coherent vision and direction. That shows strategic thinking when you are capable of synthesizing information and articulating knowledge concisely and compellingly. You can take the same approach in emails, when you are talking about completing work, you can offer the WHY behind the work and connect it to the mission and vision.

Having strategic thinking skills is essential for all people in the organization to develop because you can better deal with uncertainty and complexity. A common mistake for leaders as they rise through the ranks is that they stay in operational or execution mode and are not doing enough of the strategy work to get to the next phase of their careers. Using any of these frameworks can not only help you advance but also strengthen your contributions to your team and organization.

Quote of the day: “Always start at the end before you begin.” Author Robert Kiyosaki

Q: How do you develop your strategic thinking skills? What are your best practices for being strategic? Comment and share with us; we would love to hear!

The next blog in this series (3 of 3) will focus on thinking and reflecting practices to strengthen your strategic thinking skills

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with leaders to engage in strategic thinking for them and their teams, contact me to learn more.