It is possible that great ideas are expressed very clearly and distinctly so that everyone understands them right away and sees the appropriate value they deliver and the impact they might create.
More often, however, it seems great ideas come along with a variety of other things that are not going to add tremendous value to creating great strategy. That’s when having the strategic thinking skills to extract the great ideas from everything else is so vital to them seeing the light of day and getting the consideration they deserve.
9 Strategic Thinking Skills to Create Clarity for Great Ideas
Thinking about some of the strategic thinking skills involved in that task, here is a handy checklist you can use with yourself and others to see how adept you (or they) are at surfacing great ideas. How good are you at…?
- Organizing ideas in a logical way
- Being able to organize ideas in multiple logical ways (and a few surprising ones, too)
- Removing things that don’t fit so that great ideas are more apparent
- Identifying what is important from among lots of details
- Finding common threads others will understand, even though they cannot originally identify the threads
- Focusing attention on the few things (whether results, ideas, costs, issues, etc.) that account for most of the overall impact
- Adding in overlooked things that fit with other ideas to make them all better
- Sorting out what matters from what gets attention
- Hearing the ideas people mean to say even if they don’t say those ideas exactly
Do you stand out at these strategic thinking skills? Or do you potentially squander lots of great ideas because they don’t get the attention they deserve? – Mike Brown
