Strategic Thinking and Creativity

I remember being invited to participate in a company’s senior leadership development program over 20 years ago. The program involved extensive assessment like a detailed survey that had to be filled out ahead of time by a prescribed mixture of direct reports, internal customers, external customers, direct boss, and senior executives. The program also involved several role plays in which leadership consultants were observing your behavior relative to others in the role play and giving you both quantitative and qualitative feedback. One of my top development needs based on the assessments and role plays was practicing strategic thinking. I recall telling a leadership consultant during a coaching session that I had not developed my strategic thinking abilities because I lacked opportunities to demonstrate strategic thinking in the company. The leadership consultant explained that strategic thinking could be applied to any job to increase your contribution. My mindset that strategic thinking applied to only certain types of positions or roles had been shattered and I started my journey to learn about the art and science of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking enables employees to identify problems of importance to them and to the organization and good problems are addressed through creative thinking or creativity.

If you are interested to learn more about strategic thinking and creativity, then I invite you to take my 4-minute marketing survey for a new course on creativity that I am developing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FVZ2ZVZ. In exchange for your input, I will email you my white paper Five Ways to Improve Creativity for Innovation which provides the key idea, a description, evidence, and what you can try for each of the five ways to improve creativity for innovation. I will also give you free access to the course once it is completed for a limited time.