Becoming a Strategic Thinker [PODCAST S2 E3]

This podcast shares a four-step method that will help you in becoming a strategic thinker.  In this age of data explosion, strategic thinking skill is the key to our survival. This ability to cut through the clutter of a messy world to get to the heart of the matter is the way to take any action at all. Without this skill, we are prone to many thinking traps as we saw in the previous episode.

Thinking Traps That Make Us Less Strategic

If we rely on what comes naturally to us, it will be hard to get to the heart of the matter. The reason is not just the information explosion, but also the way our mind works. We do not function as an information processing machines around us. Instead, we search in ways that allow us to retrieve data quickly. And this means we use heuristics to function. And these heuristics do not serve the purpose they did fifty years back.

Less Strategic Means Low Impact

The outcome is that many people work on the wrong issues in a given situation. This incorrect focus leads to weak results. This relationship is true in business and life. In the previous episode, we saw how Coke was working on the long issue in response to Pepsi. We also saw how HP and Atari missed on getting in on some of the early work of Steve Jobs. We saw how we keep falling into traps with our thinking methods.

Becoming A Strategic Thinker

In this episode, we discuss how you can become more strategic in your orientation. How you can develop the ability to get to the heart of the matter fast. This skill will allow you to work on the most important issues in your business, career, and life. But more importantly, it will make sure you are not wasting your effort on working on the wrong problems.

Key Take Ways

In this episode, you will take away a powerful method to get to the heart of the matter in any situation. As you practice it, it will become second nature to you. Thousands of participants in my strategic thinking workshops have learned this skill. You can master it too.

The key takeaways from this episode are:

1. What is the heart of the matter? What is a big issue in a situation?
2. Examples of companies making mistakes in getting to the core of the matter.
3. Examples of managers getting sidetracked with the wrong issue
4. A powerful four-step method to identify the core issue in any given situation.

How to Listen?

This audio is now available as a part of a complete online strategy program called Becoming a Strategist. You can listen to it in the course here

You can also listen to this chapter here: