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Strategic Thinking

Posts under Strategic Thinking focus on topics ranging from goal setting to information gathering to positive business outcomes. Some posts compare and contrast the differences between thinking styles (for ex, being strategic vs being creative). Please use the Search bar to scan for other relevant words or tags.

Strategic Thinking and Creative Thinking Together

Strategic Thinking and Creative Thinking Together

It’s interesting to me how often the words strategic thinking and creative thinking are used in business conversations. More concerning, I’m not 100% certain we always know what these words
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The Steps of Strategic Thinking

I recently taught a course on strategic thinking, and whle the materials were helpful, it was also strange there weren’t any actual steps of stategic thinking. That is, what exactly do you
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How to Create a PESTEL

The PESTEL diagram – aka PESTLE, PEST or STEP – is one the most useful tools to help an organisation understand the external pressures and factors that will affect its
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Strategic Thinking vs Creative Thinking

What’s the Difference Between Strategic and Creative Thinking?

I was asked recently by a communications agency in Sydney to answer some questions about the similarities and differences of Strategic and Creative Thinking as they began their annual planning
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Stengthen Your Intuition in Ten Steps

Here’s how to strengthen your intuition in ten steps. Similar to creativity, intuition is something everyone understands at a basic level because we’ve all felt it. But, when pressed about how to
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Being Strategic vs. Being Creative

At a recent meeting, a senior leader used strategic or creative in ways that I instantly knew he did not know the difference between the two words. Later, when I was alone with our
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Problem Solving the Cause or Effect

Understanding and articulating the problem (“a less than ideal state” says Gene Agre in The Concept of a Problem (1982) is the most crucial step in creative thinking. But, it’s
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Reframing

How you look at the problem determines how you solve the problem. If you can’t solve your problem, change your perspective. In a word, it’s called reframing. A frame is
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Understanding the Problem

So much of creativity – if not business overall – is understanding the problem enough to be able to eliminate it. And if not get rid of it, then either
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How To Write SMART Objectives

First outlined by George T. Doran in his 1981 article in Management Review, the system of SMART objectives is one of the most well-known method for writing objectives. Yes, there’s
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The Creative Brief

Jump to Instructions Jump to Download The creative brief is one of the most useful and adaptable tools in marketing and communications. Known by different names, the basic idea is this:  one
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Organising Information: The Force Field Analysis

Jump to Instructions Like its sister the SWOT Analysis, the Force Field Analysis is a familiar tool to organise information to extract its insights. The original model was developed in
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