For a while there on LinkedIn, I was posting a lot about nuts.
Why nuts?
Because I was promoting my half-day workshop called Strategic Thinking in a Nutshell. One of the posts was about strategic thinking being a gift, and I'm going to expand on that here.
Why is strategic thinking a gift?
Because life and work can be blimmen frustrating without it! And once strategic thinking is grasped, it is a gift that keeps on giving. That's because it keeps us moving, both individually and collectively, towards the things that matter. Most workplace frustrations boil down to difficulties with making headway towards achieving goals (except maybe purely interpersonal frustrations or those with the coffee machine), and I don't know one professional who doesn't want to see impact and results of some sort in their work.
There's a multitude of things that can get in the way of achieving impact in our work. Some of those things I put into a category of realistic contextual constraints. Rather than frustrations, these constraints are best looked at as simply the context within which we make our decisions. They are the realities of our situation that we must work within. Some, we may be able to control in the short term. Others, we can only control in the longer term. Yet others, we may have little to no control over. Good strategic thinkers know to take these things in their stride, nurture their awareness of them, and let them shape their thinking.
Here's a few examples:
Limited resources
Poor leadership above
Limited existing skill sets/people capability
Stakeholder demands/expectation/understanding
Unfavourable economic, political or environmental conditions
Competitor or customer behaviour
Industry norms
Other frustrations and barriers to shared progress I put into a special category called 'lack of applied strategic thinking'. To name a few:
Not being 'heard' by others,
Conversations going around and around in circles,
Feeling like you're not all on the same page or owning the same goal,
Not having shared clarity about how each person contributes to the desired outcome, or even what that outcome is,
And the biggie, lack of alignment from the top to the bottom of the organisation.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Right before I logged in to LinkedIn to review the post draft, I was on a coaching call with someone who was experiencing some of these frustrations. And the day after, I was in one of my Nutshell workshops with a team who were expressing their own frustrations of this nature.
The leader I was coaching shared the challenge of the 'noise' created by stakeholders whose expectations and needs had not been heard or managed for quite some time. It was detracting from the actual work that needed to be done to the point that this leader was having to spend more energy justifying the existence of their department than doing the actual work. That was draining his bucket fast. He'd since had a chance to recalibrate through a break from work and reflections in our coaching sessions, but prior to that he had been very close to throwing in the towel. You know the space - frustrated, angry, reactive, defensive. Not fun.
The workshop was with a group of experienced technical specialists in a range of fields. Their organisation had a compelling purpose that they were all closely aligned with on a personal level. So let's say they are passionate about their work. That also means they are passionate about things that get in the way of them achieving impact in their work. It was fascinating to hear their perception of the barriers created by the organisational layers above them. It was wonderful to see their eyes opened to what could be possible with a common language for strategic thinking and collective decision-making. And it was exciting to see them recognising their own responsibility to communicate upwards effectively in order to shape the broader strategy with their expertise and experience.
The thing with both of these examples that I like to keep in mind is, you might be able to identify the victims and the villains in these examples, but at the end of the day, they are all people who want to go home at night feeling they've done a good job. The challenges more often come from putting a whole lot of complex people into a complex organisation with complex objectives to be achieved within a complex environment.
That's why a common language is so important.
With a language for achieving shared goal clarity and connecting decisions and actions to those goals, all of this gets easier. It sounds like a big call, but it's true.
If that sounds like just the gift you've been wanting, check out the workshop here:
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