Mine blends strong strategic process with design thinking and collaborating with teams. This just happens be very well suited to the rapid growth of online opportunities and challenges faced by many businesses. I draw upon various methods as part of this toolkit market analysis, experience reviews, desktop research, scenario planning, etc.
All strategists have toolkits that fit with their unique approach. No toolkit is the same. Each toolkit is developed overtime. So whatever your toolkit, start adding to it. Even if this means trying methodologies you have not tried before. Within a few years you will have plenty of methods and frameworks to leverage in your particular form of strategy.
Every strategy starts with a question. What market should we enter? Is this idea commercially viable? Sometimes you will be the one responsible for asking these questions. Sometimes people will come to you with a question, and you will help them to understand what their question involves. Some teams are motivated by creating commercial returns.
Some teams are motivated by improving offerings for customers. Some teams want to create social good. Whatever the motivation, if you understand what is driving a strategic question, you will also be equipped to explore what is obscured by specific motivations.
For example, the person who wants to launch a product to generate commercial returns, may also need help see what customers expect for the product to be truly attractive. And great work was limited to a much smaller number of mass media channels at that time: print, TV, OOH. Obviously, the world has changed a lot since then and with it, the practice of planning. Well, that sounds daunting. What does it mean? While you can specialize in virtually any of the things listed above, strategy tends to be best suited for people with varied interests and an insatiable curiosity about almost anything and really, everything.
We still write briefs to inspire great creative work, but our job goes well beyond that today. As strategists, we have an opportunity to shape and create better experiences for human beings. We have the power to encourage brands and companies to represent themselves more honestly, to impact how people across different genders and races see themselves represented in media, and to challenge our collective thinking about the way things are—and the way they could be. A great strategist is part anthropologist a student of cultures , part sociologist a student of people and how we are shaped by our society , part psychologist someone who seeks to understand the human mind and what makes us behave the ways we do , part analyst adept at reading and interpreting data to uncover hidden truths about our habits and part creative skilled storytellers who are energized at the prospect of changing how people think, feel or act via inspiring work.
They take winding paths, ones that often begin in other disciplines within an agency, within a related field or within a different field entirely. While few strategists share the same background, good ones often share similar traits.
Great strategists ask a lot of questions and enjoy spending time trying to figure people and things out. They tend to be people with varied interests, who demonstrate both an enthusiasm for and a commitment to learning new things.
Empathetic and compassionate observation Likely related to our curiosity, strategists tend to be people watchers who recognize that we learn more from watching how humans behave rather than simply listening to what they say. Master what works and discard what creates problems or insufficient critical movement toward your goals. To be a great strategic thinker take spaces of time to yourself. After breaks your ideas will be more sound and your mental freshness will help you solve problems more quickly and efficiently.
Relational intelligence is a must if you want to strategize well, as success is never the doing of just one person. Be aware of how your ideas impact those in your network. Collaborate to co-create. Be open and committed to seeking advice, guidance and outside suggestions. Make use of mentors, peer advisors, groups for brainstorming business ideas. As you become more strategic in your business approaches, learn to balance your creativity and passion with an optimistic realism for what is achievable in your long term.
To be a great strategist you must be clear on how important a sense of realism is in keeping you on course and out of impulsiveness. Creativity requires some trial and error to make an idea solid and usable. Strategic thinkers are patient. You cannot rush to conclusions or judgments along your journey. You cannot plant a seed and expect it to flower the next day.
Great ideas and thoughts require time to develop into great successes that achieve your visions. Patience, grasshopper. All things need time to marinate into their perfected forms. The most successful people, businesses and organizations always think ahead.
They are flexible yet pointed as they strive forward using timelines and benchmarks to measure progress. To be great you must develop the language and structure for managing creativity and innovation.
You must develop creative solutions to your specific challenges along with strategies to overcome and remedy these challenges. You must pay attention to past patterns, negative and positive, as these best predict future successes and failures. A great strategist realizes that a sustainable future requires much more than self-centered, greedy and too often unethical measures for the short-term successes. A sustainable future requires relational intelligence, operational intelligence, emotional intelligence, artistic intelligence and the ability to adapt quickly to change.
You must stay fresh mentally and be quick on your feet, never failing to come up with your next usable and innovative strategy guaranteeing your success. Related: The Fundamentals of Successful Thinking. Sherrie Campbell is a psychologist in Yorba Linda, Calif.
Scott Miller. Krishna Athal. John Lunny. Eric Hanson.
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