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How To Improve Your Strategic Thinking Skills
Strategic thinking is a lot like chess. While you can make a plan and execute it without much difficulty, the key to success lies in anticipating your opponent’s moves and countermoves. The ability to do this quickly, completely, and accurately separates good strategists from great ones.
Strategic thinkers can make connections between problems and solutions, leading them to more effective problem-solving. This blog post will provide insights on how to improve your strategic thinking skills.
Table of Contents
How do you get better at strategic thinking?
With practice, anyone can improve their strategic thinking skills by using simple techniques that build on each other. Strategic thinking is not only valuable for the business world but also impacts your daily life. Here are the five tips to improve your strategic thinking skills.
Understand your strengths and weaknesses
Make time for strategic thinking by scheduling it in advance
Analyze the situation to help you make better decisions
Seek feedback from others
1) Understand your strengths and weaknesses
It is unrealistic to believe that you can improve your strategic thinking skills if you don’t know them. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses in their strategic thinking ability, which means the approach to improvement will vary from person to person.
For example, a person whose weakness is an inability to think creatively may consider taking a creativity course or reading classic novels to help broaden their perspective.
By understanding your strengths and weakness, you can begin building a plan to improve your strategic thinking skills. Instead of focusing on improving everything, focus on one or two areas that you want to start with.
2) Make time for strategic thinking by scheduling it in advance
It is tough to force strategic thinking to happen. Most people are so busy doing their jobs that they rarely have time to think strategically unless it’s done in the form of free moments during the day, for example, while you are commuting or exercising.
It doesn’t mean that this type of thinking cannot be productive but instead reminds us that increased productivity must come from increased focus, limiting distractions. By limiting distractions and scheduling time, you will be able to develop better strategies and allow your mind to wander more freely without feeling guilty about it.
3) Analyze the situation to help you make better decisions
Strategic thinking involves identifying what is happening now, determining why it is happening, and predicting how it will affect the future. Analyzing the situation means looking at all of these factors to make better decisions.
When you are faced with a problem or have an essential decision to make, resist the urge to jump right into solving or choosing something. Instead, take time to identify what is causing the problem. For example, if your project got delayed because another department did not deliver on their promise, pinpointing who was responsible will help you figure out how to approach this issue later. You can then focus on resolving other issues that led up to this one without wasting time trying to solve problems outside your control.
4) Seek feedback from others
Strategic thinking involves looking at a situation from multiple perspectives, which means it is essential to gather all available information to make an informed decision. Asking for feedback from others is an excellent way to ensure that you haven’t missed any important facts and helps build buy-in and support for whatever decision you make.
By accepting feedback from others, you involve them in strategic thinking rather than making unilateral decisions. When others feel like they are a part of the decision-making process, they will be more willing to support it.
Final Thoughts:
To summarize, there is no universal formula for improving your strategic thinking skills because what works for one person might not work for another. Finding out what works best for you requires some experimentation and analysis of your strengths and weaknesses.
I hope this article helps you understand how critical strategic thinking is in our daily lives and provides some advice on how to improve your skill in this area.
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