As leaders transition from individual contributors and front line managers into broader roles, they are often challenged to “think strategically” or “bring strategic insights” to their work, but what exactly does that mean?
It’s about two simple ideas—thinking strategically is all about understanding the broader CONTEXT of your work and having FORESIGHT about the impact of your actions.
To expand your strategic insight, you have to be able to step back from the task at hand and think about your work and your actions in a broader frame. You can shift your perspective from simply completing a task or finishing a project (or even launching a product) with two critical questions:
- What is happening that makes accomplishing this work valuable and important?
- What might happen as a result of our decisions or actions?
The first question helps you understand context—the “interrelated surrounding conditions: the circumstances or events that form the environment” within which you are working. There are many different dimensions of context—competitive context, economic/market context, customer context, financial context, organizational context, even personal/relationship context. Some are more relevant than others depending upon the issue you face. Developing your awareness of the broader environment will help you focus on what really matters, will shift the criteria by which you make decisions; and will influence the speed with which you need to operate. We all understand some context about the work we do, but developing a strategic perspective requires broadening your field of vision.
The second question forces you to think over time. Anticipating the cascaded effect of your actions helps you road test decisions before you make them, and helps you anticipate how others inside and outside your organization will react. If you consider your choices from the impact backwards, as opposed to from the action forwards, you’ll find unexpected opportunities to tweak your path and improve your results.
Thinking strategically is the foundation for strategic leadership. It’s not all you need to take on a big new challenge and a broader role, but it’s an essential building block.
Amanda Young Hickman is co-founder of Insight Experience, a Boston-based firm delivering contextually rich, immersive business simulations and learning experiences to accelerate and integrate leadership, business acumen and strategy execution.
