Strategic Thinking:
what it is and how to do it
Strategic Thinking and Planning for Tertiary Education
ATEM NSW/ACT
Maree Conway
July 2009

1978-1980 casual jobs as
a student, Graduate Clerk
1984-1986 Volunteer at
School of Humanities
University YWCA, Berkeley
1980-1981
•La Trobe Academic 1986-1989 Student Admin Services Officer at Chisholm
Board Secretariat Institute of Technology, then Student Administration Manager,
•Government Information Unit, Monash, Caulfield AND Secondment as School Executive
Commonwealth Govt Officer, School of Physics at La Trobe 1988
1990-2004 (i) Faculty Assistant Registrar Business,
(ii) Divisional Manager, Arts, Humanities &
1981-84 Student Records Officer, Soc. Sci. (iii) Divisional Manager, Policy
Footscray College of TAFE and Planning, (iv) Director, Foresight and
Planning, and (v) Director, Foresight,
Planning and Review
2005-2007 General Manager,
Quality, Information and Planning

2007….integrating long term thinking
into strategy development, using
futures approaches

Integral Leadership Framework
Interior Exterior
Leadership
Reflective Practice
Individual
Collective
Good Ancestory
Strategic Thinking
Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Strategic Thinking
Generating Options Options
What might happen?
Strategic Decision Making
Making choices Decisions
What will we do?
Strategic Planning
Taking Action Actions
How will we do it?

Long term
Uncertain
Divergent
Incomplete
Beyond linear
Disrupting alignment

Short term
Logical
Convergent
Pragmatic
Deductive
Alignment

Strategic Thinking
• Integrating the future into your decision
making processes today by thinking big,
deep and long.

• Big – do we understand how we connect
and interact with other organisations and
the external environment, both local and
global?

• Deep – how deeply are
we questioning our
ways of operating?
• Do we operate from our
interpretation of the
past, or our anticipation
of the future?
• Are our assumptions
today valid into the
future?

• Long – how far
into the future are
we looking? Do
we understand
the shape of
alternative futures
for our
organisation?

Thinking Big:
Thinking in Systems

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking
• Leaders need to learn to see the larger systems
of which they are a part.
• Shifts focus from optimising their piece of the
puzzle to building shared understanding and
larger vision.
Peter Senge, The Necessary Revolution, 2008

Thinking Big: Systems Thinking
• Forces your attention on:
– the external environment to understand the
impact of change,
– connections and interdependencies,
– aligning internal capacity with reality of a
constantly changing external environment,
– identifying strategy that will ensure viability of
your organisations into the future.

Thinking Deep

Worldview
• What might seem real to you probably
won’t seem as real to the next person.
– not right, not wrong, just is.
• How you filter information (your lens) to
create meaning is critical to understand.
• Underpins our assumptions about what is
real and what is not.

Our assumptions
encase us in the
past.

Assumption 1: It’s impossible.

Assumption 2: I’m too busy.

Assumption 3: It’s irrelevant.

You will know when to
test assumptions when
the pain of continuing
with ‘business-as-usual’
is greater than the fear of
challenging yourself and
others.

Thinking Long:
Environmental Scanning

In education…
• Creating graduates for jobs that don’t
exist, using technology that hasn’t been
invented, to solve problems that we don’t
know about yet.
• Must understand the shape of this world to
be able to lead towards it.

The External Environment
Wil
dca Globalisation
rd Global Technology
Wil
Demographics & dca Wil
generational change rd dca
Industry
Educational rd
Gaming
Learning Lifestyle
Online
Environment Organisation
Sustainability Engagement
Values
Vocational Funding Wil
Imperative dca
Economy rd
Politics

UNCERTAINTY
High
Usual Planning Timeframe
(3-5 years)
The linear future is the one we
believe to be true, usually based
on untested assumptions
Trend
Linear Future
Low
Today TIME Future

UNCERTAINTY
High
Usual Planning Timeframe
(3-5 years)
Possible Futures
Trend
Linear Future
Low
Today TIME Future

UNCERTAINTY And…don’t forget the wildcard…
High
Usual Planning Timeframe
(3-5 years)
Possible Futures
Trend
Linear Future
Low
Today TIME Future

Trends
Whatever takes you away The weird and
from conventional thinking… unimaginable
Emerging Issues

Scan: know earlier
• Scan actively
• Scan in strange
places
• Scan for diversity
of perspectives
(not right, not
wrong, just is)

• Look for connections, collisions
and intersections.

Scan: know together
• Collective wisdom.
• Record and share scanning ‘hits.
• Gather regularly to explore.
• Get your whole organisation thinking.
• Do it often, not once.

• Strategic thinking is identifying, imagining
and understanding possible and plausible
future operating environments for your
organisation…

…and using that knowledge to expand your
thinking about your potential future options…

…about how to position your
organisation effectively in the external
environment,

…in order to make better informed
decisions about action to take today.

Putting it all together:
What might be… and what can
we do about it today?

There are no future facts

Types of Futures
“Wildcard” Possible
Scenario
Plausible
Probable
Preferable
Today
Time
Futures Cone developed by Clem Bezold

• What will be the shape of the future?
• What will be important?
• What will be peripheral?
• What does it mean for us?

• The future might be unknowable, but you
can understand a lot about what will
influence the future.

The impact of global trends...

…and of
government
policy

Competing for
talent
Skilling, re-skilling,
up-skilling
Flexibility
Relationships

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/08/are-you-a-synth.html

Demographics

Genetic Engineering

Consumer Trends

Global 2.0 is here…understanding and engaging with an
array of cultures…

Diversity of workforce and student population increasing

...student choice and time, place and pace of learning

…how will we learn?

SNACK CULTURE
Deconstructing products - smaller, faster, cheaper

Is the singularity real?
Photo: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com

How will automation
affect our work?

3D PRINTING
Moving to personalised production
www.ponoko.com
www.shapeways.com

The way we do business is changing.

…and we need to demonstrate our
‘green’ credentials

Implications
• Students – how will they learn, what will their
experience look like? What will they expect?
• Staff – how will you work, what will a day look
like for you? What will you expect of your
employer?
• The organisation – how will it have changed?
How will it have stayed the same?
• Learning – what will it mean (structure, delivery,
assessment, recognition)?
• Industry – what will it look like? How will people
work? What skills might be needed?

Your turn…
• Focus: critical issue/decision today
• Scan: two trends likely to affect your decision
into the future (think uncertainty not
predictability)
• Interpret: think about how these trends might
play out over the next 10 years
• Imagine: how your organisation look like in 10
years – image/metaphor/book or movie title
• Decision: – implications/options for your
decision today. What will be the same, what
might you do differently?

Why do it this way?
• Beyond the short-term
• Beyond busy
• “We want to be proactive…”
• But, you can’t be proactive unless you
have spent time thinking about how you
might react to events that have not yet
happened.

Unless you take
the time to think
strategically, you
will always be in
crisis management
mode and always
putting out
bushfires.

Reactive Futures

Proactive Futures

Reactive Futures – assumes linear future

Proactive futures – assumes uncertainty

• Let’s think about
how to focus our
organisations on
the future.

Reactive Futures Proactive Futures
What has happened? What is happening?
What caused it to happen? What is driving the trends that will
influence our future?
What are our alternative futures?
How do we respond? What ought we do today?
What would be the long term
consequences of our actions
today?
What will we do now? What will we do now?
After the event Anticipating the event

Recognise the blinders
• Mental filters (patterned responses)
• Overconfidence (far too certain)
• Penchant for confirming rather than
disconfirming evidence (we miss things)
• Dislike for ambiguity (want certainty)
• Group think (Abilene effect)
PJH Schoemaker and GS Day
Driving through the Fog, Long Range Planning 37 (2003): 127-142

It’s about changing
the way you think…
• Moving beyond pattern response and habitual
thinking that no longer works well when
uncertainty is dominant.
• Re-training our brains to make new connections
and generate new ideas.
• Moving our brains from automatic pilot to manual
steering.

We can't solve
problems by
using the same
kind of thinking
we used when
we created
them.

• What assumptions that underpin how you
think about your work now will need to
change?

A Challenge: Beyond Busy

• The pressures of his job drive the
manager to be superficial in his actions -
to overload himself with work, encourage
interruption, respond quickly to every
stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid the
abstract, makes decisions in small
increments, and do everything abruptly.
Henry Mintzberg
The Manager’s Job: Folklore or Fact, HBR, 1975

• “Managers who get caught in the trap of
overwhelming demands become prisoners of
routine. They do not have time to notice
opportunities. Their habituated work prevents
them from taking the first necessary step toward
harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to
dream an idea into existence and transforming it
into a concrete existence.”
Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers
Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time, HBSP, 2004

The Result?
Our organisations
will tend to be
purposeless
wastelands,
populated by the
perpetually busy
and the inherently
unhappy.
Stephen Johnson, What do you do for a living?, 2007

• I’m too busy dealing with today to
think about the future…
actually means…
• I can only think short term. I don’t
have time to think strategically.

• A futures thinking approach may mitigate
against falling into the trap of being caught
reacting to the day to day, where the
urgent drives out the important, where the
futures goes unexplored and the capacity
to act, rather than the capacity to think and
imagine, becomes the sole measure for
leadership.
Brent Davies
Leading the Strategically Focused School: Success and Sustainability
(2006)

If you succumb to the busyness syndrome, this is
how you approach the future.

To think strategically, you have to
move beyond busy.

Characteristics of Strategic
Thinkers

Open mind…

Systems thinker…

Accept diversity…

Think outside the box…

Think outrageously at times…

Curious…
Explore, learn, reflect

Optimistic about creating
the future…

Challenge assumptions…

Aware of own worldview…

Are compassionate…

…and generous

…and, seek and foster
collective wisdom

Back to Work

• Strategic thinking is thinking about the
future.
• As leaders in organisations, your
responsibility is to influence others to
understand the imperative of the future.

The imperative of the future
• That a sustainable way of life for us as
individuals, for our organisations, our
societies and our planet is possible only if
we integrate the future into our decision
making today.

The imperative of the future
We focus on immediate needs and problems and are
trapped by this illusion that what is most tangible is
most real. We've been conditioned for thousands of
years to identify with our family, our tribe, and our
local social structures. A future that asks us to
overcome this condition and identify with all of
humankind looks alien indeed...we've never before
lived in a world in which one's actions, through global
business, can have their primary consequence of the
other side of the world.
Peter Senge
Creating Desired Futures in a Global Community, SOL, 2003

And, just how
do I do this in
real life?

It’s a challenge!

The gap between reactive and proactive
strategy is bridged by making time for
strategic thinking.

Individual Strategic
Foresight Foresight
Individuals recognise and build their
foresight capacity
unconscious conscious
Individuals begin to talk about and use
futures approaches in their work
implicit explicit
Collective individual capacities
generate organisational capacity
solitary (structures & processes) collective

YOU
Interior Exterior
Reflective Practice Leadership
Commit to building time to Make a change in your routine
do this daily – stop doing when you go back to work.
something else if you Individual
have to
Collective
Good Ancestory Strategic Thinking
Recognise the impact of Whenever you have to make
decisions today for future a decision, ask: “Am I
generations thinking, big, deep and long?”
Based on the work of Ken Wilber

YOU AS A
Interior Exterior
LEADER
Leadership
Reflective Practice
Build a scanning system to
Encourage and support
inform decision making – and
an outward looking staff
pay attention to it
Individual
Collective
Good Ancestory Strategic Thinking
Create a futures focused Have thinking workshops as
decision making culture well as planning workshops
Based on the work of Ken Wilber

Make space to think

“Strategic thinking can be colloquially
defined as "acting in the present with
a clear sense of the future"- a sense
of what the future environment might
be, and a vision of what you want the
future organization to be. No aspect of
cultural change is more important than
focusing organizational values and
behavior on the future.”
http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/seminars/futurizing/focusing.html

How do you know when?
• Strategy framework defined by tomorrow’s
strategic issues rather than today’s operations.
• Strategic thinking capabilities are widespread in
the organisation (not just senior executives).
• Process for negotiating trade-offs is in place.
• Performance review system focuses managers
on key strategic issues.
• Reward system and values promote and support
the exercise of strategic thinking.
Adapted from Thinking Strategically, McKinsey Quarterly, June 2000

• The aim is to understand - as best we
can - the long term context of our
decisions today, so that we make
those decisions as wise and as robust
as is possible today.

Maree Conway
Thinking Futures
http://www.thinkingfutures.net
http://futuresthink.blogspot.com
maree.conway@thinkingfutures.net
Photos from fotolia.com and istockphoto.com