Are you intentionally cultivating your strategic thinking?

Two activities can significantly strengthen your strategic thinking.

THINK ON IT: Are you intentionally cultivating your strategic thinking?

As a leader, you make countless decisions every day. It doesn’t matter if your organization is new, established, or founded a hundred years ago, there is always something demanding your attention right now. And the pace may never subside. Truth be told, if you're like many business leaders, you may not even want it to. 

But a prolonged hurried pace can also erode your ability to think strategically. The immediacy of the psychological rewards that come from short-term actions is appealing: you get the info you need, you make a decision, you move on. Making the decision is often the reward itself—now you can move onto the next problem. 

But strategic thinking requires a different discipline. Strategic thinking requires you to sit with your thoughts, with the data, with the lists of pros and cons and unknowns. It requires you to not always know the answer, to consider and reconsider and consider again. And sitting in that tension is hard—we want to resolve it, as we’ve talked about before. 

Being able to sit in that tension of strategic thinking is what can take your organization from good to great—or from an organization that deals in incremental change, to one that deals in transformation. 

Strategic thinking isn’t something that we can take a quick refresher course on and then check a box; it’s something we have to practice, over and over again, in order to get better at it. 

Two activities can help you strengthen strategic thinking and you learned them as a child: reading and writing. 

Long-form reading, such as lengthy articles and books, strengthens your concentration and critical thinking skills. 

Long-form writing, in the form of consistent journaling, creates self-awareness and can unlock creativity that's vital for effective leadership. 

Taken together they are the inputs and outputs for strengthening strategic thinking. 

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." — Henry Ford 

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