I'm often asked, are great strategic
thinkers born or are they made? And my answer is always yes. It's like so many important and valuable
human capabilities, a mixture of nature and nurture and experience. You're not going to become a world-class
marathoner if you don't have the right physiology, the right muscles, the
right lungs, but you still need to train very hard, and it's very similar with
strategic thinking. You certainly are born with an endowment. Some people are naturally better at it
than others, but there's so much you can do to
develop yourself. And I always tell people, don't worry
about the endowment. Focus on the improvement because my research shows definitively
that you can get much better at being an effective strategic thinker. I'm Michael Watkins. I'm a professor of
leadership and organizational change at the IMD Business School in
Lausanne, Switzerland. My book is "The Six Disciplines of
Strategic Thinking." Strategic thinking has always been a
critical skill at the top. Leaders must be able to recognize emerging challenges and opportunities, establish the right priorities to focus their organizations, and, critically, mobilize their people to do
what's necessary to adapt to the many changes that are going
on today. In the research I did on
strategic thinking, I identified six key mental disciplines that underlie
your ability to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize. Pattern recognition is a foundational discipline of strategic thinking. The ability to find the signal, the
important information in what can be a sea of noise. Not just absorbing what's happening, but
thinking about why, thinking about connection. When grandmasters look at a chessboard, they don't just see pieces. They don't
just see the layout of the board. They see the most important patterns that exist in that configuration. They see opportunity. They see concentrations of power. They see potential vulnerabilities. At the heart of your ability as a leader
to navigate complexity is the discipline of systems analysis. It's absolutely essential, of course, that
systems models capture the most important features and dynamics of the system that you're talking about. But given the very, very high levels
of complexity today, no human being and indeed, so far, no computer is able to flawlessly model the entire set
of variables and interactions that constitute a complicated system. One example I use is climate, where today we have very good models of
climate, but they're absolutely simplifications of reality. They model large chunks of the atmosphere,
for example, in ways that are really kind of,
crude almost. But they do capture the most
important features of the overall climate system in a way that lets you make
good predictions. As you focus on the discipline of
mental agility, it's important to understand this idea of
level shifting. There's a CEO I work with who describes
this as cloud-to-ground thinking. The ability to move from a high-level
perspective, to be in the clouds, to see the big picture of what's going on, but also to drill down into the detail
when necessary. The great strategic thinkers I know are
able to move between those levels of analysis and do so fluidly and also intentionally. Structured problem-solving is what you do
with teams to help them engage in rigorous processes of framing and solving the
most consequential problems that the organization faces. The structured part is really essential because it ensures that you're doing a
good job of truly solving the right problem, that's the framing part, and then generating and testing the right
options so that you end up with a robust solution. There can be many stakeholders involved
that have an interest in what happens. And so it's essential, therefore, to
establish a process that moves people through that, you know, framing and solving
of problems such that at the end of the process, they're in alignment, if not enthusiastic, about what happens going forward. At its core, visioning is
about identifying the future to which you are trying to move
your organization, a compelling portrait of where we are
going to go together and why we should feel excited about
getting there. There's a core tension you need to manage between ambition and achievability. Err too far on the side of ambition. You're creating something
that's unrealistic people won't feel like they can
really accomplish, and ultimately does exactly what you're
trying not to do, which is to demotivate people. Err too far on the side of achievability, it's too easy, it's not ambitious enough, it's not
exciting for people, It doesn't really fundamentally motivate them. And finally, politics is an
essential part of every human organization, and there's simply no avoiding it. There
are certain tactics that you can use that will help you influence people. A classic example of this is what's known
as sequencing strategy. This is really about being thoughtful
about the order in which you communicate with people and how you engage in order to build momentum in the
directions you want the organization to go. I'm going to talk first to Christian, and then I'm going to talk to Stephanie. And if I have Christian and Stephanie on
board, then getting Robert on board is going to be easier. And I need to be careful in the process not to overplay things in a way that
causes Trudy to feel threatened by what I'm trying to do and start to do things to mobilize potential opposition. Just think about this process of moving people step by step to a place that they wouldn't have gone in
a single leap. The people making the decisions about
leaders' futures are more and more weighting the importance of strategic thinking
capability in their decisions about whether you will advance or not. And this just amplifies the importance of focusing as much as possible on
building your strategic thinking capability. It really is the fast track to the top.