Category: Strategic Thinking

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

I recently taught a course on strategic thinking. While the materials were great, it was also strange that there weren’t any actual steps of stategic thinking. That is, what exactly do you

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much creativity – if not business overall – is undestanding the problem enough to be able to eliminate it (and if not get rid of it, then either to

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