Yesterday's Brainzooming article shared ways to increase the strategic thinking in your organization without holding an offsite meeting.
Here's another way to improve daily strategic thinking. It builds on one idea in yesterday's post ("Develop a working command of ten to fifteen strategic thinking questions that fit many of the business and organizational situations you encounter").
This approach leads to developing a list of targeted questions specific to your business situation. You can complete it in a week, but we recommend spreading it over several weeks or during a typical month of activity.
4 Steps to Customizing Your Strategic Thinking Questions
Step 1. Anticipate
Before the week or month you have selected, list typical business issues and conversations you have with your team and other groups you work with regularly.
Step 2. Categorize
Group the issues and conversations into general categories. Possible examples include:
- Understanding things (analysis, evaluation)
- Developing things (innovation, creativity)
- Building things (operations, manufacturing, efficiency and process improvements)
- Growing things (creating more sales, implementing more initiatives)
- Fixing things (diagnosis, correction)
- Forecasting things (projections, estimates)
Step 3. Track
With the list in Step 2 complete, use it during your selected timeframe to keep track of how many issues and conversations pertain to each category. If you need to add other categories, add them.
Step 4. Compile
After you’re done monitoring your conversations and activities, see where your focus is. Work on developing a custom list of ready-to-use questions in each area. You can mine our extensive lists of strategic thinking questions for ones to use. Here are links to some of our most popular lists:
- Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand
- Two Questions to Ask for Your Strategic Plan
- Questions for Crafting Startup Strategy in Any Business
- 9 Questions for Breaking a Business
- 14 Innovation Starters
- 10 Questions to Identify New Partners and Sponsors
- Strategic Thinking Exercises – Finding Your Brand’s Strategic Analogs
- 5 Strategic Thinking Questions for Integrated Listening
- Asking a Different Type of Question
- Insights and Strategy Questions – 100 Most Creative People in Business
- Creativity and Social Media Questions – 100 Most Creative People in Business
- Branding and Customer Questions – 100 Most Creative People in Business
This focused approach will pay dividends with your ability to develop a solid command of strategic thinking questions for daily use to boost strategic thinking in your team, yourself, and everyone you work with in the organization. – Mike Brown
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