Thinking Futures - Three Strategic Levels

Strategy is thinking about identifying where you want to be in the future. Strategic planning is the way you go about documenting, implementing and monitoring that strategy today. Strategic planning is not about thinking strategically.

Yet, strategic planning definitions often encompass the three strategic levels of thinking about the future, deciding about strategic options, and planning to implement those options. Flawed strategy or inadequate implementation can be the result of confusing these three levels of strategic activity.

In reality, these levels overlap and blur, but there tends to be a focus on producing tangible plans rather than on the quality of the thinking that go into the plans. As a result, even when organisations believe they are thinking long term, consulting widely in their planning processes and taking multiple viewpoints into account, they are often just reinforcing deeply held and untested assumptions and thinking.

Strategy development processes that do not have a defined stage that allows systematic exploration of the future, as well as surfacing and challenging of assumptions, beliefs and ideas held by staff about the future, are flawed.

Staff respond to authentic opportunities to participate in the development of a shared view of the future, which is achieved by adding a simple step in your planning process to ask what they think the future might hold for their university or organisation. Like all scanning information, staff input is subject to analysis and interpretation, but it is a step that adds breadth to strategy development.

For strategy to be informed by futures approaches, the current model of strategic planning needs to be reconceptualised into three separate, distinct but interdependent stages, each with its own focus and outcomes.

Three Strategic Levels

Level	Focus	Key Question	Outcomes
Strategic Thinking	Generating Options	What might we do?	Options
Strategic Decision Making	Making Choices	What will we do?	Decision
Strategic Planning	Taking Action	How will we do it?	Actions

In this model, strategic thinking is a distinct stage in the strategy process, requiring its own methods and approaches, and time to undertake properly. This stage is about long term and divergent thinking and exploring the maze of the future.�

The outcomes of this thinking inform strategic decision making about which direction to pursue, which in turn directs strategic planning - which documents action to achieve strategy.

Strategic planning in�terms of documenting agreed�action and monitoring that action�is well understood and practised today.

However, strategic thinking is�a stage in strategy development that is not well understood,�and it is the stage where futures approaches add most value. It is here that the� "who, where, and how?"�of strategic planning is enhanced by the futures focus on��"what, when, and why?".�It is�about thinking long term.