The 6 disciplines of strategic thinking
Are you starting an initiative or reevaluating an older project with fresh eyes? Are you starting a new job and looking to impress your team? Or maybe, though hopefully not, you’re in the middle of a crisis you must resolve? Whether you need to make the most of an opportunity or improve a tricky situation, your fundamental goal can be boiled down to a simple question: How can I find success?
But you don’t just want to be successful, do you? You want to prove that you are the best person for the job. You want to find a way to be a true leader.
Michael Watkins, professor of leadership and organizational change at the IMD Business School, has an approach to help you accomplish just that. Through his research, he observed that those who evaluate future leaders for advancement increasingly emphasize the importance of strategic thinking.
“It really is the fast track to the top,” Watkins told Big Think+ in an exclusive interview.
What makes strategic-thinking skills so valuable? According to Watkins, they are critical because of today’s volatile, uncertain, and highly competitive business environment. Markets are unpredictable, and coworkers can be fickle. Too many leaders favor reactive, short-term decision-making to calculated, long-term frameworks. These high-stakes and challenging settings make the ability to think strategically imperative to success.
A strategic thinker is not just a good worker who approaches a challenge with the singular aim of resolving the problem in front of them. Rather, a strategic thinker looks at and elevates their entire ecosystem to achieve a robust solution. This requires examining your current environment, looking beyond it at possible futures, and creatively envisioning what it takes to reach this future.
In his book The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, Watkins isolated six mental disciplines that, when mastered (or at least mindfully practiced), can help improve a leader’s ability to recognize challenges, establish priorities, and mobilize their teams to effect change.
The six disciplines of strategic thinking
The first discipline is pattern recognition. A foundation of strategic thinking is the ability to evaluate a system, understand how all its pieces move, and derive the patterns they typically form. Watkins likens this to mastering chess. When masters look at a chess board, they don’t just see pieces and the game’s current layout. They see a complex set of patterns and realities, the opportunities on offer, and potential vulnerabilities.
Watkins’s next discipline, and an extension of pattern recognition, is systems analysis. It is easy to get overwhelmed when breaking down the functional elements of a system. A strategic thinker avoids this by creating simplified models of complex patterns and realities. Like a chess master, they can survey the situation in front of them, identify the most significant aspects of this environment, and then determine how every piece will interact with the others. When something impacts system A, how will this ripple to system B? Does that also spread to system C, and if so, how?
Mental agility is Watkins’s third discipline. Because the systems and patterns of any work environment are so dynamic, leaders must be able to change their perspective quickly to match the role they are examining. Systems evolve, people grow, and the larger picture can change suddenly. As such, a leader’s job might involve different skills than anticipated, and they’ll need to pivot mentally before they can progress strategically. This leads to the concept of level shifting — the ability to process ideas from a high-level perspective, drill down into the fine details, and move back to a high level when necessary.
“The great strategic thinkers I know can move between those levels of analysis and do so fluidly and also intentionally,” Watkins says.
Structured problem-solving is a discipline you and your team can use to address any issue or challenge. The idea of problem-solving is self-explanatory; the essential element is the structure. Developing and defining a structure will ensure that the correct problem is addressed in the most robust way possible. This specifically entails not only framing the elements of the problem, but also the stakeholders and tools you intend to use to address it. Watkins specifically highlights that this is a social consensus-building process. By the end, your objective is to have accomplished your goal and aligned your team so that they are enthusiastic about moving forward. The trick is to allow for some flexibility when creating and working with this structure.
As Watkins notes: “As you move through the process, you frame the problem initially, and you start to explore solutions, you may find there aren’t great solutions. You may also realize that we’re really not even solving the right problem. So, structure is highly valuable. Inflexibility in implementing the process? Often not helpful.”
Visioning is about explicitly identifying the future you are leading your team toward (and, at this point, you may have already picked up on the common thread). Great leaders don’t rely on vague goals. The rallying cry of “moving toward a visionary future!” lacks specificity. It isn’t tailored to the organization and where the leader wants to move it.
When discussing the development of a vision, Watkins points out, it requires a deliberate balancing act: “There’s a core tension you need to manage between ambition and achievability. Err too far on the side of ambition and you’re creating something that’s unrealistic that people won’t feel like they can really accomplish.” This can demotivate people. “Err too far on the side of achievability, it’s too easy.” This can also demotivate people because it isn’t exciting.
Political savvy is the last, and probably the most challenging, discipline. Politics plays an inescapable and massive role in any collaborative environment. A common reaction, Watkins points out, is to deride this reality with a desire to avoid it altogether. Anyone can understand this desire. Politics, and by extension the emotions underlying it, can be messy, but both are intrinsic to how people function. Instead, Watkins recommends that leaders determine how they can engage with politics productively, authentically, and purposefully.
“I think the intent and the kinds of activity you do make the difference between those who understand and use organizational politics to achieve great things and those who engage in self-serving behavior,” Watkins adds.
Intentionality is key, mastery takes practice
As you probably already figured out, the common thread tying these six disciplines together is intentionality about the future. A good leader can recognize the patterns and systems around them, shift their perspective to keep an eye on the entirety of the goal, develop a structure that moves toward a defined vision, and navigate the complex politics inherent to a system of people.
This may seem like a lot to handle, and it can be, but don’t worry if some of these disciplines are outside your wheelhouse. Like any skill set, everyone is born predisposed to excel at some of these and struggle with others. That struggle doesn’t mean you’ll never be a great leader or succeed in your new or future position. You are likely already a strategic thinker; you may just need to work hard to hone some of your skills.
Watkins likens this to a marathon runner. Some people may have a more natural disposition to running — they have the build, the lungs, and the stamina — but that doesn’t preclude less inclined people from becoming great runners and reaching the finish line. And those that have a natural disposition? Well, they still have to practice.
“I always tell people, don’t worry about the endowment,” Watkins says. “Focus on the improvement because my research shows definitively that you can get much better at being an effective strategic thinker.”
