What is Strategic Thinking¹?
Strategic thinking is intent driven. It provides a point of view about the long-term market or competitive position that an organisationorganization hopes to achieve over a defined time period.

Source¹: Competing for the Future, Prahalahad and Hamel (1994)

Strategic Foresight:

• is the ability to systematically think about and develop alternative futures.
• is the planning that results when future methods are applied to real-world situations.
• is the theory and practice of envisioning alternative future scenarios in order to make better decisions today, turning insight into opportunity.
• uses emerging signals from political, economic, social, and technlogical environments. It feeds the front end of innovation from a human needs and technology realization opportunity perspective.
• contributes to coping with uncertainty and complexity. It deals with the identification, assessmentassessment, and usage of emerging signals to recogniserecognize and give warning about threats and opportunities at an early stage.
  

Successful strategies are rarely achieved by spontaneous flashes of genius, but rather result from the systematic collection, analysisanalysis, and evaluation of facts, circumstances, trendstrends, and opinions.
Source: UK Government Cabinet Office - Survival Guide

Elements of strategic thinking²

• Taking a systems perspective: mentally modelling a complete end-to-end system
  
• Intent focused: determining a sense of direction and outcome
  
• Intelligent opportunism: continuously adapting and innovating
  
• Thinking in time: connecting past, presentpresent, and future
  
• Hypothesis driven: asking 'what"what if ...?...?" and then 'if"if ... then ...'..."
  

Source²: Strategic Thinking: Can it be Taught?, Jeanne M. Liedtka (1998)

Strategic Thinking starts from recognisingrecognizing and understanding changes (key Insights) that are likely to take place over time by considering major trend-based outcomes in nine dimensions:

• Business: competition, culture, innovation ...
  
• Economics: finance, regulations, trade ...
  
• Environment: agriculture, climate, raw materials ...
  
• Healthcare: disease, medical research, well-being,
  
• Industries: biotechnology, clean technology, nanotechnology
  
• Lifestyles: consumption, education, values ...
  
• Politics: government, rights, security ...
  
• Society: community, demographics, generations ...
  
• Technology: internet, microdevices, science ...
• For a more detailed listing click here

Approach
The Strategic Thinking approach identifies the major trends in each of these dimensions and analyses ways in which these are likely to develop and interact with each other over a pre-determined study period. Nothing is guaranteed about how the future will evolve but strategic trends research requires wide-ranging and deep investigation, not shallow and narrow looks at the top ten current global trends appearing in the newspapers. Smart companies had spotted these global trends long ago through their early warning radar systems and taken advantage of being early adopters. Most likely they will be early leaversleavers, tootoo, as the market peaks and declines.



Classification
Creating a large inventory of identified Trends requires a highly effective classification system and methods to rank rate and qualify their impact.

Various models exist to classify trends and evaluate their impact. [Ranking, rating, change type, decision etc]. For example: The analytical framework described in John Petersen's book - 'Out of the Blue' (Arlington Institute).



Having established a trends database and evaluated individual trend outcomes based on probability one can determine which are the key drivers of change that will have an impact on particular organisations.organizations.

The future is not a single destination. The further out we looklook, an increasing number of different possible outcomes can be foreseen. Some will influence a particular organisationorganization more than another.

We find that none of our clients determines the same key drivers and rarely includes the top ten current trends appearing in newspapers in their current form. Through this approach organisationsorganizations can map out their own destiny, unique selling points and solutions to solve real issues.

Further references

• Thinking About The Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight
• Strategy Survival Guide
• The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme
• Out of the Blue
• Using Futures Approaches: A guideGuide to gettingGetting startedStarted
• What will influenceInfluence the future?Future?
• What is Strategic Analysis?
• Why Strategy Is Like Sailboat Racing

Next: Assessing trendsTrends Back: Scanning challengesChallenges To: Shaping Tomorrow


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