Strategic thinking All strategy starts with strategic thinking

Strategic thinking

All strategy starts with strategic thinking

Strategic Management = strategic thinking + strategic planning

Porter (1987): “There are no substitutes for strategic thinking. Improving quality is meaningless without knowing what kind of quality is relevant in competitive terms. Nurturing corporate culture is useless unless the culture is aligned with the company's approach to competing. ”

Garratt (1995) defines strategic thinking as … A process by which senior executives can rise above the daily managerial processes and crises to gain a different perspective of the organization and its changing environments.

Strategic thinking involves asking two critical questions … • First, what is the structure of your industry, and how is it likely to evolve over time? . . . • Second, what is your own company’s relative position in the industry? (Porter, 1991)

Elements of strategic thinking

A number of writers have talked about the dictation between strategic thinking and strategic planning.

Strategic Thinking and Panning are analogous to Right brain and left brain

Strategic thinking The purpose of strategic thinking is to discover novel, Thought process: imaginative strategies which can re-write the rules of the Synthetic competitive game and to Divergent envision potential futures Creative significantly different from the present Strategic management The purpose of strategic planning is to operationalize the strategies developed through strategic thinking, and to support the strategic thinking process Strategic planning Thought process: Analytical Convergent Conventional

Strategic Thinking and Planning Strategic thinking Synthetic Divergent Creative Role of strategic planning: to realize and support strategies developed through strategic thinking process and integrate these back into the business Intuitive Innovative Strategic Management Logical Systematic Conventional Prescriptive Convergent Strategic planning Role of strategic thinking: to seek innovation and imagine new and very different futures that may lead a company to redefine its core strategies and even its industry

Heracleous (1998) made a distinction between strategic thinking and planning by an analogy to single-loop learning and double-loop learning.

Actions o Environment Feedback Single-loop learning: Adapting or adjusting as usual, without critically reexamining guiding assumptions (O denotes Organization) Actions Critical thinking o Environment Feedback Double-loop learning: Enlightened, creative action with results from critical reexamination of guiding assumptions (O denotes Organization)