Here are two productive question-based strategic thinking exercises for a broad set of business situations.
This strategic thinking exercise has you look for analogous situations to yours, going to school on others who are smarter or better than you are in solving similar challenges.
The first step is to identify the characteristics of your situation or challenge, asking yourself the following questions to find ways to generalize your situation:
Identify who else faces a similar situation to your generalized business challenge and then use their perspective to identify how they’d address your situation and solve it:
This strategic thinking exercise focuses on where a business or internal department best delivers for customers. Themes that emerge help to identify areas for near term focus or elimination.
First, answer the following questions. Ideally this would take place in a pre-session survey:
Record the answers. Look for themes – areas of agreement & disagreement. Based on the themes that emerge, have your group answer the following questions:
There are many more strategic thinking exercises, but these two are beneficial ones to apply to common business situations that you may face.
The next post wraps up the overview on strategic thinking by addressing how to turn your efforts into successful results.