Strategic Thinking Exercises – 6 Best Characteristics

By Mike Brown

What are the characteristics of the best strategic thinking exercises?

 

They all need to:

1. Allow everyone to participate – even those with little or no direct experience.
   Some people who participate in strategic planning will have less experience than other participants will. Great exercises, however, accommodate these differences in experience and do not leave anyone without a role based on what they know or have done.
2. Incorporate emotion.
   It does not necessarily matter which emotion strategic thinking exercises incorporate. It could be fear, angst, frustration, humor, hope, or passion. Or another emotion. Or some combination of all of those. If your strategy development only depends on logic and does not incorporate emotion, you are missing something.
3. Require people to think atypically.
   If everyone comes into and leaves a set of strategic thinking exercises without having thought in new ways, there is a major disconnect. There needs to be specific variables built in to ensure people are thinking along new paths and in ways they have not had to consider previously.
4. Introduce a strategic twist that doesn’t match expectations or reality.
   If you want different perspectives from your current strategy, strategy and brainstorming questions need to go beyond simply what the current situation looks like. They should incorporate an unexpected twist or thinking detour to make participants feel uncomfortable with their standard way of thinking.
5. Create new questions.
   The more you attempt to answer strategy and brainstorming questions, the more new questions will emerge. Strategic thinking is about exploration. If it’s fruitful exploration, you’re going to uncover strategic paths that will be laden with new questions.
6. Leave room for unanswered issues.
   This goes along with triggering new questions. Successful strategic thinking exercises can’t be expected to answer everything. The future isn’t certain. The objective should be to consider as many possibilities as possible, even if some, or even many of them, can’t be completely answered right away.

Here are some other go-to strategy exercises. See how these could fit into your strategic planning and innovation work:

• Doing the Opposite of Competitors’ Bad Practices 
• Using Analogies to Think about Your Strategy 
• Disruptive Innovation Possibilities

See this and other newsletter articles at http://amt-mep.org/files/8913/8365/8626/2013-11.pdf

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