I have been asked by a friend from Vietnam to mentor someone who wants to be a strategic planner. I am not mastered the art and science of strategic communications planning. And sometimes, the strategic directions that I come up with are first glimpsed whilst showering or lounging by the pool or swimming (and drowning) with Excel-tables and PowerPoint reports.
When I got offered a job by a start-up company, I was first asked "How do you create strategies?" My answer - which I felt was simple, but not simplistic (at least I felt it wasn't simplistic) - was "You don't create strategies; they reveal themselves to you as you tease stories out of the data and information that you have".
I remember talking about an "integrative mind" - a mind that freely moves from left- (the rational side) to the right-side of the brain (the creative side). I also recall talking about how phenomenology (remember that from philosophy?) and metaphysics actually help - how you break things down to pieces and examine them in abstraction from the whole, and then bringing them all together again into one bigger, more holistic whole.
But all these are things that may be innate.
I have toyed around with strategic frameworks in the past - and boy, I love 2x2 matrices. I loved the frameworks of Kenichi Ohmae and of Micheal Porter - as well as the book "Thinking Strategically" by Dixit and Avinash. I enjoyed talking about Game Theory, the book "A Beautiful Mind" (which discussed in some detail the Nash Equilibrium), and a whole lot of other things.
Did they help in crafting strategic thinking?
Perhaps. But Mintzberg (from Strategy Bites Back, another book) says that strategic thinking goes beyond all these frameworks. Strategic thinking comes when you've considered all the things that you need and have to consider - and take a calculated risk and leap into the unknown.
I would be honest and say that some of the strategies that I have come up with were what I would call generic - because the questions and the issues were generic. But there were solutions that demanded more than just a generic response - it required the amalgam of different models, different thought patterns, different truths.
So how do you teach someone to think strategically?
I think it is akin to teaching philosophy: My Philosophy professor from University said that "Ang pilosopiya ay ginagawa" - which means "You do philosophy, you don't lean philosophy". From him, I learned the value of questioning the questions and the assumptions that lie behind the questions.
And it has served me well.
Perhaps that's the starting point: learn to question the questions and the human motivation behind such issues and questions.
After all, the questions posed by humans are tainted by our own humanity.
Does that answer the question - on how to teach strategic thinking?
I am, for once, at a loss.
