How to Make Strategic Thinking a Habit — My Key Learning
By: Jamil Ali Ahmed
Tags: Thinking, Management And Leadership, Habit Building, Strategy, Strategic Thinking

1. Why Make Strategic Thinking A Habit?

96% of leaders believe that strategic thinking is essential but don’t have enough time on their hands for strategic thinking.

That is a huge gap to abridge.

This course will take us on how we can bridge the gap and make strategic thinking a Habit?

2. Making Time for Strategic Thinking

You need to make Strategic thinking a priority.

Start putting in conscious effort and time to be strategic in your approach.

The best time to think strategically is when you are least distracted, like During exercising, While taking a shower.

Another step you can take is by writing your thoughts down.

By taking these steps, you absolutely will discover you do have time to be strategic.

3. Finding the Right Place For Strategic Thinking

Most people do not focus on strategic thinking due to lack of time, however, place actually has more impact.

Being with nature reduces our stress and helps us become more creative.

Leverage the power of place.

Creativity sparks more ideas and you can actually see possibilities that might have been invisible to you before.

4. Make Small Changes To Spark Strategic Thoughts

With consent, you must start recording conversations.

Recorded conversations help you remember important points.

Draw your ideas to build your foundation.

5. Forget To-do Lists

Focus on creating different lists for different processes.

You can make a To-Focus-On list. It helps you put efforts on what is important to you and what will be important to you.

list. It helps you put efforts on what is important to you and what will be important to you. 3 months > 1 year > 5 years.

You can also make a To Be list.

list. This will help you filter out your long term and short term goals.

6. How to Analyze Your Decisions

We make decisions but we do not take out time to revisit them.

Revisit your decisions to determine your thought process and examine the outcomes.

Use Scenario Thinking . Instead of coming up with one alternative, you actually take the time to come up with three different scenarios and plan them out.

. Instead of coming up with one alternative, you actually take the time to come up with three different scenarios and plan them out. Use both pre mortem and postmortem analysis.

and analysis. Recapping what you did is a great thing to do.

But what is better is premortem. You brainstorm with the team any issue that may arise.

7. How to Constantly Improve Your Strategy

When it comes to strategic thinking, we can’t afford to get cocky. That’s the essence of building strategic thinking as a habit.

Maintaining an inspiration file — physical on paper or it could be electronic.

Pick a few areas and clip it in some way and you put items in this folder. And then, you make it a regular practice. You can even put it on your calendar to revisit and read things in that folder.

Give yourself assignments that are around areas of personal and professional growth.

This will help you set out time to think strategically and make you a better strategic thinker.

8. Look at the Root Cause of Problems

You will encounter many problems along the way. You need to keep whacking them and that will keep you busy for a long time. Wrong approach.

Your focus should be on identifying what’s the root cause of the problem. (practice the 5 why’s)

Getting to the root cause helps you solve other problems downstream.

First, you need to get the facts straight.

Secondly, you need to be explicit about your goals.

Finally, make sure to ask questions so that you understand the issue.

9. How Can The Whole Process of Strategic Thinking Be Easier

We need to simplify the processes for ourselves. Here is how to do it:

Write down literally every single step that you do.

Determine which steps are essential and which are going to take only your time.

Cut out the non-essential.

Finally, run a test, see what happens. Feedback is essential in the whole process.

We have to question our assumptions, we have to constantly ask, “How can this be easier?” And when we do that, we become more strategic thinkers.

10. What can you Cut Out?

If you keep adding more goals, objectives, and initiatives, your strategy will become unwieldy.

What can we cut out? There are a few ways that you can think about it.

Ask yourself: what is most critical and what is most time sensitive? The Eisenhower Matrix works here. What’s urgent and what’s important?

Ask yourself what can only be done by you and what can be delegated?

Remember, in many instances, people can do things pretty well if you train them.

Finally, ask yourself where you can make cuts and actually improve results? Too many options for consumers is not a good choice.

By asking yourself what can you cut out, you may, in fact, actually be able to do things better, and that is an incredibly strategic move.

11. What is unlikely to Change?

Strategic thinking can help you in understanding long-term developments and long-term trends.

You should be able to learn to tell the difference between a legitimate trend and a passing fad.

It is your responsibility to learn about them. Think about what is unchanging and what is changing.

That will enable us to make better strategic decisions.

12. Where can you get more Leverage?

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, and 168 hours in a week.

So how do we get more leverage over others?

One, ask yourself how do I do something once and get that in front of even more people?

Another, how you can do two useful and important things simultaneously.

We all have the same constraints, we’re all busy, but if we can get smarter about our use of leverage, we can be even more strategic.

13. Start Thinking Strategically Everyday

Just about everyone knows that strategic thinking is a good thing to do.

And yet, they don’t do it.

It is so important to make sure that we are focused on the right thing. How tragic to spend a huge amount of time and effort on something only to discover it was the wrong thing.

It is extraordinarily powerful in a rapidly-changing world to make strategic thinking a habit in your life.

That’s all from my side. If liked it and learnt something so please kindly share it. Thank you.

Here is the video version >> https://youtu.be/KnyAFEGPe5o