Strategic Thinking: Can it be Taught?

B ASHING TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO STRATEGIC planning has become the favoured past-time of leading business authors on both sides of the Atlantic. The litany of indictments against the types of planning processes in place at most large multinational firms is long, and often difficult to disagree with. Traditional processes have choked initiative and favoured incremental over substantive change. They have emphasized analytics and extrapolation rather than creativity and invention. They have denied those closest to the customer a voice in the process. They have lulled us into complacency with their comforting illusion of certainty in what is in reality a hopelessly uncertain world. Yet, as we consign several decades of writing on the subject of strategy to the dustbin-what have we got to take its place? Strategic thinking, we are told. And the critics of strategic planning are as confident of the promise of strategic thinking as they have been of the pitfalls of strategic planning. What remains less clear is what the concept of strategic thinking actually looks like in practice, and how we get from where we are today to where we need to be. Without achieving the kind of detailed understanding of strategic thinking that we have today of strategic planning, we risk introducing yet another appealing concept to the strategy lexicon that has little relevance to practising managers. This article attempts to address this concern, and argues that the essential elements of strategic thinking can be captured in five discrete, but inter-related, elements. Taken together, these elements are capable of producing significant positive outcomes for organizations. Yet, it is important to note at the outset that it is individuals who think strategically, not organizations. In order to think strategically, however, inditegic conversations that occur within it. Strategy viduals require a supporting context. Organizations planning systems can play an important role in this need to provide that context, and to manage the straprocess.