You've been at your job for almost a year, and the annual strategic plan meeting is coming up. It’s your first time attending, so you ask around and hear varied opinions—some find these meetings essential, others pointless. Approaching the week with uncertainty but an open mind, you’re still unsure if this type of planning is truly significant or just a corporate buzzword. You wonder: what does strategic thinking even look like in practice?

Strategic thinking is a proactive process focused on envisioning long-term goals, anticipating potential challenges, and leveraging opportunities through comprehensive analysis.¹ It goes beyond basic planning by synthesizing internal strengths and external trends to create adaptable strategies that evolve as new information emerges. This continuous and integrative approach ensures that organizations remain resilient and prepared to navigate dynamic environments effectively. Nowadays, the competitive reality for any type of organization may suddenly shift overnight—where many changes result in failure. For cases like this, strategic thinking is an approach that makes the anticipation of such changes more manageable. 

Inherent to this type of thinking are the strategic thinking skills necessary to adequately prepare either individuals or companies to face challenges head-on or prepare for future obstacles. We may focus on four main types of strategic thinking skills (although this list is not necessarily exhaustive of what strategic thinking skills may entail):²

• Analytic skills: To develop a strategy that can help achieve a company’s goals, a range of elements may need to be analyzed: market conditions, industry trends, financial performance forecasts, and resources inside the organization. 
• Communication skills: These are essential for any company where internal and external partners need to effectively communicate—regardless of industry, company size, or any other aspects. This entails establishing a shared vision and making sure that everyone involved is on the same page. 
• Problem-solving skills: Strategic thinking involves understanding and addressing problems that are expected to arise—or, unfortunately, already have. Perhaps there is some fierce competition that has been growing quickly, financial goals need to be revamped, or productivity has taken a hit. 
• Planning and management skills: Challenges cannot just be discussed; the integration of planning solutions is a critical step. After implementing the above skills, putting a plan into place with appropriate management techniques is the final touch, which helps leaders at a company provide guidance to their teams and workers to achieve goals. 

There are two classic contexts where strategic thinking emerges: business and leadership.² However, this approach is relevant in almost every sector, including (but not limited to) healthcare,³ government,⁴ education,⁵ and your own personal development.⁶

1. Business: A common place we may experience strategic thinking is at the companies we work for. Going into that annual strategic meeting, you and your team might come together to analyze various types of data and devise a strategic intent or strategic narrative to determine a roadmap for a specific time period.² Although annual meetings are popular, different organizations may hold strategic meetings at higher frequencies to review how effective previous strategies have been.
2. Leadership: When it comes to addressing strategy, various leaders, like managers and stakeholders, are heavily involved in the decision-making process. Who the leaders are and how they elect to approach strategy has a significant impact on company results. For instance, a management team may consider which products they want to offer next, who their biggest competition is, and what constraints they have on resources like time, finances, and, of course, the employees themselves. 

In the business world, leadership meetings, and other places where strategic thinking is exemplified, a related concept called strategic planning may also be a popular aspect of corporate strategy.⁷ These two concepts fall under the larger umbrella of strategic management.⁷ Several thinkers in this field see strategic thinking and strategic planning as being closely intertwined while still having clear distinctions. One way to differentiate these strategic management tools may be seeing strategic thinking as a means to prepare for various versions of a company’s future. In contrast, strategic planning focuses on discovering and supporting strategies already developed in the planning phase by implementing them into a business context.⁷

We may conceptualize the differences between these two strategic management processes as follows:⁸

Strategic Thinking Skills: The skills needed for employees to think in critical and logical ways to positively influence business outcomes. Four common strategic thinking skills include analysis, communication, problem-solving, and planning and management. 

Strategic Management: The formulation and implementation of a given strategy for a company when approaching goals relative to management and company stakeholders. In practice, strategic management includes both strategic thinking and strategic planning.⁸

Strategic Planning: An analytical way of coming up with and organizing a strategy, such as the steps needed to make data and analyses later applied to strategic thinking. Strategic planning may be thought of as actualizing and supporting the ideas developed from strategic thinking.⁸

Strategic Foresight: Also known as corporate foresight, this is a planning-oriented approach to prepare for expected changes by envisioning possible futures with accompanying action plans. Strategic thinking can help in this process by anticipating a company’s goals, vision, and related strategies ahead of time.

Strategic Intent: The plans and direction a company sets to achieve its long-term vision. Establishing this intent is a key element of strategic thinking, which requires assessing the organization and anticipating competition for its product or service.⁹

Strategic Narrative: A company or leader’s ability to express a clear and convincing vision for future strategy. This may be one way to implement strategic thinking in practice where company values are reiterated, leaders are humanized, and employee opinions are considered.¹⁰

Long before the corporate world, the broader concept of strategy emerged thousands of years ago in times of conflict and war. One critical thinker was the Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu, especially with his work The Art of War in 500 BCE—which still has far-reaching effects on how businesses may find creative ways to compete.¹¹ A popular strategy from Sun Tzu that may be applied to modern companies is winning a battle without actually fighting.

A contemporary example of Tzu’s “winning without fighting’” approach is the history of Apple’s business strategy for personal computers. Unlike Apple, many other technology companies have tried to compete based on price, such as Toshiba and Lenovo. In contrast, Apple has historically succeeded in making unique and simple features to grow a truly faithful set of customers. Instead of trying to “fight to win,” Apple is more concerned about itself: a unique market that builds brand loyalty. Tzu may have been a fan of how Apple was influenced by his type of strategy!

Sun Tzu saw strategy as art and science intertwined, possessing characteristics of both creativity and deception to pave the road to success. Other early thinkers devised clever approaches to military strategy—such as the Trojan horse in ancient Greece or Machiavelli’s 1532 book The Prince, containing sneaky means for government leaders. Near the end of the 18th century, during the Revolutionary War, the colonies outsmarted Great Britain by embracing less conventional tactics like guerilla warfare, targeting and taking out specific British officers, or forming alliances with the French Navy. These strategies, prominent hundreds of years ago, are reminiscent of how strategic thinking is displayed in business today, ranging from aggressive tactics to teaming up with former competitors to find market advantages. 

Bringing a scientific approach to strategic management came about in the early 1900s when American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. In this text, Taylor made the observation that the way many companies conduct their work is poorly organized. If the scientific method could be incorporated into strategic management, companies could increase their efficiency and performance.¹¹

One of the first official definitions of strategic thinking emerged in 1965 once again in a military context, where army general Andre Beaufre coined the term strategic thinking as a mental process that is both abstract and rational, in which one must bring psychological and material data together. Given his military background, Beaufre believed that a strategist should possess both strong analytical and synthesis skills: the ability to break down data for diagnosis and the capability to combine that data effectively to launch into action. 

Fast-forwarding to the 1980s, a Canadian academic named Henry Mintzberg provided an overview of business strategy throughout a series of articles for Harvard Business Review, emphasizing how processes are always dynamic and uncertain—and usually don’t work out as planned. Unlike Beaufre, Mintzberg suggested that strategic thinking is more about connecting the dots (synthesis) than finding the dots (analysis) when it comes to a given strategy.¹² In this sense, Mintzberg thought that a manager would draw from a range of sources, such as personal experience, competitor performance, as well as market trends and other data. Critically, these various contexts needed to be synthesized together to discover a broader pattern of effective strategy. 

Mintzberg was also crucial in formulating the distinction between the two different strategic management approaches: strategic thinking and strategic planning. He proposed that although strategic planning can be systematized, strategic thinking cannot be reduced to a fixed process—although it must happen first to guide any implementation. While Mintzberg believed strategic thinking could not be structured into a formal process, others argued that strategic thinking inherently involves adopting a systems perspective.⁸

Going into the late 1990s, another academic, Jeanne Liedtka, helped to differentiate these two strategic management concepts further.⁸ In contrast to Mintzberg, Liedtka wanted to redefine strategic thinking as a system to understand how strategic actions directly affect strategic results. The five key attributes of Liedtka’s definition of strategic thinking are as follows: having a systems perspective, emphasizing intent, thinking in terms of time (past, present, and future), being driven by hypothesis, and thoughtfully bringing in opportunities—referred to as intelligent opportunism by Liedtka. We can understand Liedtka’s five key attributes as illustrated below through some strategic examples:

Jumping forward to the 2020s, a prominent part of the evolution of strategic thinking is the influence of technology. In the past, a strategic thinking meeting may have meant your bosses behind a closed door, with way too many Excel spreadsheets shared after the fact. Today, these meetings are conducted virtually with accelerated communication, real-time goal tracking, and tools like KPIs to measure how the company is performing. A natural question to ask ourselves is how our interconnected online worlds can lead to new ways of strategic thinking—along with their accompanying problems, like cyberattacks! Most of us are also wondering how companies will handle the dilemma of AI rivaling humans in strategic contexts.

Sun Tzu 

A Chinese military strategist and philosopher best known for his work, The Art of War, which set the foundations for strategic thinking. As a prominent figure from the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China, Tzu’s influence is still seen both in Western and Eastern philosophy today.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

An American mechanical engineer known for his methods of improving industrial efficiency. As a pioneering management consultant, Taylor released The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he suggested that strategic management must incorporate science for a company to be truly successful. 

Andre Beaufre

A French military strategist who was most active during WWII and the Suez War. Beaufre was one of the first to define strategic thinking. Some of his other notable work surrounds nuclear deterrence and the future threats of nuclear war.

Henry Mintzberg

A Canadian academic and author known for his writing on business and management, including key contributions to Harvard Business Review. Mintzberg has taught at McGill University since 1968, where he is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management. Mintzberg holds a Masters in Management from MIT Sloan and was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1997.

Jeanne Liedtka

An American strategist and professor of business administration at the University of Virginia at the Darden School of Business. She is responsible for refining the distinction between strategic thinking and strategic planning. Liedtka received an MBA from Harvard in 1976, followed by a DBA from Boston University in 1988. She is known for her contributions as a strategy consultant with the BSG.

It’s pretty much impossible for businesses to be successful all of the time. However, strategic thinking can help companies work toward goals and see long-lasting results. Let’s take a look at just some of the ways.

Remaining Future-Focused Against Your Competition 

For a plethora of companies, looking at past performance as the primary blueprint to plan for the future is not always the best way to come up with a new strategy. Fixating on previous results may leave an organization “stuck in their ways,” unable to see how adapting to new approaches may be vital to success. Instead of a past orientation, strategic thinking gives businesses the option to investigate the perspectives of their customers, employees, and competing industry leaders—coming from a fresh, future-oriented point-of-view.¹³ This process helps companies to consider, reconsider, criticize, interpret, and organize a better plan of how to proceed.

A concrete impact of strategic thinking with a future orientation is to be able to think, plan, and navigate the competitive landscape better than others in a respective industry. In a globalized world, there is a natural exposure to more competition, where borders, markets, and the evolution of these domains are key considerations. Strategic thinking is one way to find this competitive edge—after all, it's quite likely that your competition is strategically thinking, too. 

Strategic Agility 

Many proponents of strategic planning have extended the concept into being “agile” in their business approach. Research shows that an agility-based approach is one way a firm may enhance performance in a competitive scenario.¹⁴ One way to think of agility in general is how to speedily recover, adapt, and transform a means into an action. Strategic agility is just this in a business context: a company’s ability to change, recover, and reinvent the evolution of its strategy in a dynamic environment.

Being strategically agile may be tied to the capability of a company to handle change management. Two goals that may be achievable with a particularly agile way of thinking are ensuring a goal is reachable on the spot and that a company has market leadership through active change. Embracing strategic agility can help effectively organize and make use of the information a company already has to be ready as change looms. 

Questions have arisen about whether the “theory” behind strategic thinking can be effectively put into practice. Concerns include repeated attempts to apply strategic thinking without noticeable results and doubts about whether it can be proactively taught or trained in the workplace.

Strategic Insanity 

You’ve probably heard of the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcomes to somehow change. But did you know that we can see insanity in the business world, too? While many companies and firms may successfully implement strategic planning with desired results, others try over and over again with the same old strategies, expecting something different, only to circle back again. In this case, we may call this strategic insanity.¹⁵

At any workplace, a prerequisite of a truly strategic environment is the willingness of managers and employees to participate actively in the strategic decisions being made. To foster such willingness, one solution to strategic insanity is making sure training actually works. We can usually gauge if training is effective or not, depending on whether we feel engaged and want to apply the learned skills. Some suggest that training employees on strategic thinking is not only possible but can also have a lasting positive influence on strategic behaviors. 

Can Strategic Thinking Be Taught?

Mintzberg, a historical proponent of strategic planning discussed above, once said, “Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.” With this in mind, we must ask: is the same true of strategic planning itself? This question seems to be an ongoing uncertainty in the field,¹⁶ as the teachability of strategic thinking has been doubted more recently in the 2010s, too.¹⁷

Perhaps the only way to answer this question is to consider what strategic thinking even is in the first place. If we follow Mintzberg’s definition—where strategic thinking cannot be organized based on features, values, and examples—it may seem impossible to teach this approach. Meanwhile, if we embrace Liedtka’s viewpoint of strategic thinking being a systematic process, we might find the opposite to be true. In fact, Liedtka’s five elements may provide a clear framework for anyone to approach strategic thinking. What we may need to consider next is the most effective way to implement this framework into the educational landscape—such as by using nudging techniques.

How Youth Activists Can Think Strategically 

Teenagers and young adults are finding new ways to take action and support social causes they care about, whether that be about mental health issues, climate change anxieties, or political landscapes. Regardless of what the issue is, one thing remains clear: the voices of young people matter. Critical thinking may just be a medium through which this age demographic can achieve social change, especially in youth activism programs. 

Researchers Larson & Hansen investigated young people fostering strategic thinking in a youth activism program in Chicago focused on social change.18 The authors were interested in why the public school system was jumping to suspend students so quickly—for being late to school, using their cell phones, or even just laughing in class! This research looked at a teen civic activism group called “Generation Y” in how they dealt with challenges on a weekly basis when campaigning for social issues. The students came to three ways to think strategically:

1. Looking for strategic information: How can youth find information to achieve their social activism goals?
2. Framing strategic communication: How can teens and younger people actively use the information gathered to influence those around them? 
3. Sequential contingency thinking: What steps can be taken to reach their social activism goals while considering unforeseen circumstances?

Several youth activism programs emphasize understanding human systems in solving social problems and include school boards, teachers, and, of course, the students themselves. In the navigation of such networks, it is crucial to consider how youth can think strategically to have autonomy over the change they wish to see. Strategic thinking enables young people to behave in prosocial ways that benefit society as a whole—without neglecting the importance of their individual goals.

Moving the Mental Goalposts: Why Aiming for the “Best” Isn’t Always The Best Strategy 

Though strategic thinking takes a broader approach relative to organizational success, it can be applied to our personal lives when we set goals. In this piece, TDL columnist Akhil Bansal reconsiders the idea of “going for the best.” Sometimes, this can be a balancing act between maximizing versus satisficing in terms of goal attainment. 

Protecting Your Projects from Cognitive Bias

Even the most skilled strategic thinker is prone to bias when projects are on the run. In this article, the link between two biases—the planning fallacy and groupthink—is discussed in relation to a major city project. TDL author Natasha Hawryluk discusses some possible remedies to these biases, drawing a connection between group cognition and transportation in London. 

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