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The story of the six capabilities of a strategic thinker

When I started developing my own strategic thinking material, it was off the back of an experience developing a recruiting strategy where I started with no real understanding about strategy at all. I learnt a lot through the process, then got curious about the human element (no surprise there for a psychologist!). As I absorbed more and more of the material out there on strategy and strategic thinking, ideas started to crystalise in my mind about things that weren't there in what I was reading but seemed to be at the crux of people's ability to do it well, or at all. After a lot of reading and thinking, the 'three C's were born - Complexity, Creativity and Chaos. As I started to work with people, it quickly became apparent that I needed something tangible to apply these to. I needed to be able to help people know 'what' to do as well as 'how' to do it. And so my strategic thinking process was born. It's not really anything new, just my synthesised version of a whole lot of other people's ideas. All strategic thinking processes follow a similar basic pattern, but as with most things, there are all sorts of different ways of skinning the same cat so I pulled in some of what I thought were the more helpful ones. As I applied the framework further, I began to see more of the realities and difficulties of thinking strategically in a real-life context where distractions abound, work


loads are frantic, and decisions are fraught. Entering stage left, we now have Capacity and Courage. At the same time, I for some reason decided that Complexity and Chaos had too much overlap so I ditched Chaos, then got some feedback about that and realised it definitely deserved its own place!

Finally, with 5 C's in hand, I happened across some reading which triggered a memory of a conversation I'd had years earlier with someone in the Leadership Development Group at the Navy. It was about how when we run on auto-pilot and get busy and overwhelmed, we often narrow our focus to what is right in front of us and what is demanding our attention. So, you guessed it, it was Curiosity that filled the sixth spot, completing a conveniently symmetrical model!


In the blogs that follow, I'm going to delve into each one of these capabilities and explain why they are so important. Welcome along for the ride!




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