Thinking Futures - Thinking

Strategic Thinking

Futures approaches enhance strategic thinking to generate the insight needed to create futures ready strategy today.

Thinking Futures facilitates a range of processes to support and develop strategic thinking, underpinned by linking global thinking about the future with local strategy. Removing the constraints to thinking often imposed by day-to-day operations, we work with staff to think broadly and creatively about potential futures for their organisation.

		Thinking Strategically

Strategic thinking is about developing an organisational strategic foresight capacity. Strategic foresight is the ability to systematically explore possible organisational futures to inform decision making today. To be able to explore where there are no future facts requires divergent thinking to allow staff to be innovative and creative in identifying possible future strategic options.

Freeing up our thinking today means that we can generate more strategic options that might otherwise have emerged than if we used only traditional planning processes. Using environmental scanning output and working as a group, staff can share their views about the future of their organisation, which provides additional rich data to consider prior to making strategic decisions.

But...strategic thinking is only useful if it enhances decision making today. Futures approaches include particular tools to ground strategic thinking in the realities of decisions that have to be made today so that practical outcomes are achieved.

		What is Strategic Thinking?

A 1999 discussion paper on Strategic Thinking produced by Eton Lawrence for the Research Directorate in the Policy, Research and Communications Branch of the Public Service Commission of Canada provides a useful overview of strategic thinking, and how it relates to strategic planning. Lawrence concludes that:

"strategic thinking ... is not only critical to the survival of the organization in these times of rapid and accelerating change, but more importantly, can be effectively accommodated within a progressive strategy-making regime to support strategic planning ... strategic planning and strategic thinking work in tandem, rather than [a model] in which strategic planning impedes the flourishing of strategic thinking" (page 13).

As Leidtka ("Linking strategic thinking with strategic planning", Strategy and Leadership, October 1998, (1), 120-129) suggests, strategic thinking is about disrupting alignment to create a view of a preferred future, while strategic planning is about creating alignment and dealing with current realities. She identifies five characteristics associated with strategic thinking:

systems perspective,

intent focus,

intelligent opportunism,

thinking in time, and

hypothesis driven.

Heracleous (1998, cited in Lawrence, 1999) suggests that the purpose of strategic thinking is to discover novel, imaginative strategies which can re-write the rules of the competitive game; and to envision potential futures, significantly different from the present. Thought processes here are synthetic, divergent and creative. The purpose of strategic planning is to operationalize the strategies developed through strategic thinking, and to support the strategic thinking process. Thought processes here are analytical, convergent and conventional.

The need to integrate divergent thinking into planning and strategy processes is also highlighted by John Ratcliffe from the Futures Academy at Dublin Institute of Technology. In a recent paper ("Challenges for Corporate Foresight: Towards Strategic Prospective through Scenario Thinking", Foresight, 2006, 8 (1): 39-54) he describes three distinct phases in futures work in organisations: divergence, emergence and convergence. The focus of most futures work is currently on emergence with little or no emphasis on the divergence and convergence stages, resulting in little difference between futures work and conventional strategic planning processes. His work has therefore been around developing a futures approach called "strategic prospective through scenarios thinking" which integrates scenario planning with the French prospective method. So, spending time dealing with divergence and actively encouraging it in the form of strategic thinking is a necessary precursor to the effective emergence of strategic options.

		Thinking is Work Too!

When someone tells you that a planning workshop is going to be held, is your reaction that:

(i) it's a waste of time and money because the decisions are already made, or
(ii) that you'll pay for it afterwards trying to catch up on the work that piled up while you were planning, or
(iii) do you see it as an opportunity to have some time out to think?

How often do you hear someone say something like "if only I had time to stop and think for a while ..."? And yet, when we get the time to think, often all we think about is the work we are not doing back at our desks.

Planning workshops are frequently viewed as something we have to do, and which we have to endure - a compliance exercise. At a recent workshop I was told that when staff read the program, and saw the word 'planning', they decided to leave for that session because it would be boring.

We need to start viewing thinking - about plans, strategy and implementation - as work too. Attending workshops should not, however, be lumped together with the 'meetings, bloody meetings' syndrome that afflicts so many universities. Workshops are short, intensive thinking events, where the aim should be to tap into the strategic thinking capacities of the staff who are present.

Workshops are a waste of time if they do not use the opportunity to broaden out the thinking that is informing strategy development, by providing staff with an authentic voice. Planning workshops can be a way to ensure that strategy is not only the province of senior managers, even if those senior managers have the final say in deciding strategy. All staff have the capacity to think strategically and workshops provide a way to tap into that thinking. And, finding out what staff think about the future of their university can not only help to shape strategy, but can also help ensure successful implementation plans.

There's a lot of talk about 'ownership' and 'empowerment', but both require authentic processes for the staff voice to be heard. The process of sending out a draft strategy for comment by staff is the usual way of getting staff feedback, and it's the best way to be ignored by those staff. Staff need the opportunity to comment on strategy as it is being formed, not after it has been documented. And, senior managers need to pay attention to those comments as they develop strategy - or they shouldn't be surprised when the strategy doesn't get implemented in quite the way they had expected.