I've spent a lot of time understanding strategic thinking as a competency. As I mentioned in my last webinar, cognitive aspects of leader/business performance often play the poor cousin to behavioural aspects, despite their proven importance (they are both important of course). What I want to share with you today is some ideas on thinking competencies, or specifically, think smart competencies - because no one wants you to think dumb - and this question of raw material.
In a conversation with a colleague, we agreed that really, my work is about thinking. Full stop. Every part of my strategic thinking model relates to some aspect of effective, smart thinking. I'm talking things like broadening one's perspective, being curious, listening, understanding, and gathering information to base decisions on, making time to think deeply, problem/challenge identification, goal definition, systems thinking, thinking through complexity, responding to change adaptively, the list goes on.
A lot of these things are trainable skills. So what does the raw material for smart thinking look like? Of course, there are cognitive abilities and natural thinking preferences and tendencies. These include the ability to think about our thinking, and research tells us that the better we are at that, the better we can learn thinking skills and improve our thinking on the fly. But to think smart, and think strategically, we also need things like an openness to listen and learn, a willingness to try on different perspectives and to be wrong. Humility. Confidence. Courage. Resilience (for thinking under pressure). These, of course, are important raw material characteristics for all leadership competencies.
At its heart, strategic thinking is about thinking smart. And that is why I'm passionate about strategic thinking as a competence, and about its place at all levels of organisations. Strategic thinking is, quite simply, smart. Does it have a place in your organisation's competency model? Learning and development system? If you're a leader, thinker or problem-solver, does it have a place in your skill-set? It definitely will, but how aware are you of it? What are your strengths? What raw material do you bring and how does it help you to think smart? Where could you develop? All great questions to challenge yourself with!
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Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash
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