Strategic Thinking Is Still Thinking

Thinking

The central thesis was deceptively simple: strategy is fundamentally about thinking. Yet the thinking required is multifaceted, disciplined, and increasingly valuable in a world where AI offers the temptation to outsource it.

She took the audience on a journey through the evolution of strategic thinking. It was almost an anthology of strategy, touching on thinkers such as Michael Porter and Gary Hamel, alongside the influence of firms such as McKinsey & Company and BCG. Over time, strategy has become more sophisticated. The focus has shifted from relatively narrow concerns such as profit, shareholder value, and value capture towards a broader and more complex approaches, like ecosystem thinking.

Her argument for investing in strategic thinking was compelling. Organisations that think strategically are better prepared to respond to change. They are more resilient because they have already explored possibilities, tested assumptions, and considered alternative futures. When disruption arrives, the winners are often those who have done the thinking beforehand.

Greek Temples

She was also critical of the state of many contemporary strategies. Too often, they resemble a Greek temple: a lofty purpose at the top, three strategic pillars beneath it, and a foundation underneath. Familiar, neat, and generic. Such frameworks may look strategic, but they rarely reflect the complexity of the challenges organisations face. 

My own takeaway was that the presentation was as much about human behaviour as it was about strategy.
Strategic thinking is both a cognitive and a social activity. 

Complex environments require complex thought

Complex environments require complex thought. That is precisely why strategy cannot simply be delegated to AI. If we ask AI to write our strategy, we should not be surprised when the answer converges towards the middle of the road: seemingly competent, annoyingly coherent, and largely interchangeable.
Real strategy requires taking the long road of thinking. It requires debate, reflection, disagreement, imagination, and judgment. The speed and convenience of AI are attractive, but they come with a cost.

Effortless thinking may produce efficiency, yet it can also produce banality. 

Perhaps that is the strategic challenge of the AI era: not how to think faster, but how to keep thinking deeply. And as I tell my clients often, you cannot compress everything. Going faster is not necessarily a good thing in strategy. And when you hire a strategic consultant who installs a drumbeat, you might want to stop and think instead.