Strategic Thinking

When things move fast, it’s easy to get stuck in a short-term, shoot-from-the-hip mindset. To scale and collaborate well, you and your team need to think and execute strategically. In this workshop, you’ll sharpen your team’s long-term thinking skills and practice tools to help everyone on the team identify objectives, diagnose obstacles, avoid unintended consequences, and involve the right stakeholders at the right times, even when timelines and priorities shift.

During this workshop participants will:

• Learn the “behavioral units” of strategic thinking and explore research on how to turn this type of thinking into a team-wide habit.
• Apply strategic thinking tools and frameworks to a real project they are working on now and get feedback from other participants. Tools include:
• Link maps (inverted triangle method), to map activities to team and company goals
• Gap Analysis, including determining lag and lead measures
• 3 Lenses Model – to diagnose root causes of issues and practice systems-based thinking
• Consequences Check – to practice mitigating risk and build a habit of tradeoff awareness, as well as how to lead skillful pre-mortems
• Inclusive Planning – to practice involving the right stakeholders at the right time during all phases of setting up a tactic, project, or strategy
• Identify situations in which they are at risk of thinking reactively rather than proactively

After this workshop, participants will know how to:

• Pause regularly and ask questions that focus on long-term impact vs. short term demand, org-wide systems vs. individual perspectives
• Apply strategic thinking habits across contexts
• Communicate ideas more strategically and inclusively

To make the workshop a great experience for all, you will need:

1. Computer with functioning camera (so we can see you)
2. Headset with microphone (so we can hear you)
3. Pen and paper
4. A nice quiet place to dial in from