Strategy Thinking™ is Staying in a Constant Creative Process

What is Strategy Thinking™? It's the process of staying in a creative process/loop and resisting the framework of a beginning, middle, and an end. Inquiry, questioning, resilience, letting go, imaging and re-imagining, listening acutely, resisting ego (yes, seriously), and deep dives of discomfort and ambiguity are all key tools of the strategy thinking™ method.

When you are so focused on the destination - your identified goals, objectives, mission, or the place you are supposed to arrive at - you miss too much along the way. And in being in the head space of destination and results, you put your business, your concept, your project at risk.

It’s not that you don’t want to be focused on your goals and objectives. It’s instead that you want to shift from being overly focused on them so that you are more aware of being in the process of arriving at them. In doing so, you allow room for new information, new ideas, and new thinking that informs and inspires - allowing your goals and objectives to expand, shift, grow, and form along the way.

Here's how.

Once you identify your goals and objectives, let go of the grip.

Hold them loosely.

Move toward them.

Allow information, ideas, and the unexpected in to poke at what you think you know about them and about getting to them.

Apply insights.

Take risks by asking people what they think.

Be willing to let go of what no longer fits.

Hang out in the unknown.

Be uncomfortable.

Essentially, allow your goals and objectives to be fluid rather than fixed, malleable rather than static. They are markers for being in the process of strategic thinking.

The idea is that you are continually identifying goals and objectives while also continually refining. It’s a both/and. You define. You let go. You re-define. You re-let go. You notice. You try things out. You learn. You fail. You try new things out. You move toward things. You move away from things. Sometimes you arrive in a straight line, but rarely. Most of the time, it's a very circuitous route and that is how it should be.

Strategy thinking™ is all about being in the process of identifying, trying, re-trying, re-identifying. It’s constant. It’s a practice. And, it’s a discipline. As well, it’s a dialectic. You create a vision, idea, objectives, and goals. Then, you allow the process to give you insight and information, noticing cues and accepting critique. You let go of what you originally thought and form a new vision, idea, objectives, and goals. And so on.

Strategy Thinking™ is form and function, creation and destruction. You build. You refine. You arrive. You depart.

The key is to stay firmly grounded and rooted in the process of creating visions, ideas, goals, objectives, product, and projects while simultaneously allowing for changes, shifting, re-evaluating, and new ideas.

If you aren't in that space, you aren't doing strategy thinking™.