Master Strategic Thinking: 60 Tips, 12 Steps, and 25 Ideas for Better Decision-Making

 Master Strategic Thinking: 60 Tips, 12 Steps, and 25 Ideas for Better Decision-Making

How to think strategically and make better decisions

In this article you will learn the following

I. 60 Tips on How to Sharpen Your Decision Intelligence, Strategic Thinking to Help Making Effective Decisions
II. 12 Steps of Problem Solving – Because Every Tough-Decision That You Need to Take is a Problem to Be Solved
III. 14 Barriers to Decision-Making
IV. 25 Ideas How to Use 6 Thinking Hat Brainstorming Tool to Make Powerful Choices and Take Great Tough Decisions -9 basic reasons to use the blue hat + 7 questions for White hat + Why Red hat + 6 reason to use Black hat + 5 reasons to use yellow hat + 7 reasons to use green hat

Irrespective of whether you are in a leadership position – you must make multiple decisions on an everyday basis - about – your life, your family, your business, your organization, your customers, your employees, in your financial and social aspects etc. etc.

The art of thinking strategically can make a difference between – a successful outcome or very expensive mistake.

Strategic Decision-Making is all about – identifying your decision traps and fallacies, assumptions, biases, mental short-cuts, and short-term thinking habits – and then charting practical courses of action.

Thinking strategically is one of the most important and one of the most essential skills – you need to sharpen, strengthen and build on – this is mandatory in case you are the CEO or even if you are just starting out and have no idea how the future looks.

Strategic thinking involves – critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, ability to ideate & innovate, ability of recognizing opportunities even in a desperate situation when no one can - and know how to take advantage of them.

If you look at your life today – What you have accomplished and who you have become - was the result of the decisions and choices, you made and actions you took - in the past.

And as per the same theory - whatever actions you take today and the decisions you make now - will shape who you will become and what you will have in the future - and you can Propel your life to reach the pinnacle for a fulfilled life.

60 Tips on How to Sharpen Your Decision Intelligence, Strategic Thinking to Help Making Effective Decisions

1. You can train yourself to make better decisions - through exploring choices, options, alternatives and possibilities
2. Well balanced & informed decision-making requires – making sense of ambiguity, identifying opportunities within a change or challenge, analyzing complex problems, exploring alternative points of view, and looking for unconventional solutions, possibilities, options, and choices.
3. Identify your objectives, goals and vision – make them SMART
4. Create an order of priority from Must-dos to would be alright if I get that
5. Identify what information you have & what information you need that is missing
6. Identify and challenge your assumptions about why you must achieve something to what you need to do
7. Identify what resources are available and what resources you need
8. Evaluate data & evidence and predict potential issues with your process so far – course correct it if you see any decision-trap present
9. Find ways to acquire resources and obtain missing yet crucial information
10. Identify all the important internal and external shareholders
11. Create a communication plan to create buy-in from them
12. Arrange to have brainstorming with your important stakeholders as well as customers – to fine tune your ideas and to make it more effective
13. Cloud source what you feel is unknown and you don't have the bandwidth to deal with that yourself
14. If it is a VUCA or BANI situation - Examine probabilities and present impact choices to Mitigate over-optimism in project planning and prediction by making appropriate Make trade-offs – in your strategic plans
15. Learn to think creatively – find ways to experiment with non-conventional ideas
16. Learn the habit of challenging and questioning – every decision and solution
17. Stop accepting the first though or solution that come to your mind - Ask yourself constantly is there a different, better and more effective way to do this – you may not always get breakthrough ideas but the habit of trying to force an alternative way will help you train yourself to think 'outside the box'
18. Make it your habit of taking crucial decision when you have say – about 2/3rd or 70% information
19. Train your mind to look at any situation from multiple perspective – like from each of your 360-degree stakeholders
20. Train yourself to think big - Strategic thinking is all about the bigger picture, so you need to stop looking at the small detail especially while planning -Block it out in your diary and be ruthless
21. Stay informed - observe the market – learn to spot trends, the disruptions taking place globally in other businesses different than yours
22. Be up to date with the global best practices, benchmarks, competitor performance and customer habits
23. Learn to connect seemingly disconnected things – to make sense and generate ideas on a constant basis
24. Identify gaps – among your business, product or service and customers aspirations or expectations and needs
25. Use SWOT or SOAR to compare your strengths or weaknesses with your opportunities you will start to see where new ideas could help you achieve your potential
26. Develop the ability to see trends outside of your industry that you could 'connect' with your product or service, or your solution to help improve your customer or employee value proposition to give them great customer or employee delight
27. Start thinking from the perspectives of your customers and employees – then ask yourself -What could you do differently to help distinguish yourself from the competition
28. Then find ways to Assess your ideas in a smart way
29. Important tools that you should use - MECE Principal, Decision Tree, SFA Matrix [is a tool to score strategic plans on their suitability, feasibility and acceptability]
30. Identify business models and then tweak them to create a most effective blend from different models
31. Identify technologies like AI, Gen AI, BI, Big-Data analysis tool - which can help you make informed decisions fast and more effectively
32. Get in the habit of running all new concepts through your chosen frameworks as a matter of course
33. Use these tried and tested models & tools will not only help you Embrace change BUT also may enable you to disrupt the market or business
34.Create a learner mindset & a learning organization
35. Ensure that your business, commercial, financial acumen is at par with the best leaders
36. Have people in your team - who think strategically and challenge everything for the sole purpose of finding the best way
37. Find ways to deliver value to your stakeholder – which is way beyond their expectations
38. Learn to Ask Thought provoking Strategic Questions to elicit solutions you could never have thought by yourself
39. Ask these questions to yourself and others
40. Learn to assess situation objectively - practice Considering Opposing Ideas – then question your assumptions, and put your hypothesis through rigorous testing
41. Playing devil's advocate with your ideas will help you preempt weaknesses and can also help you sharpen the logical skills you need to communicate and execute your strategy
42. Create habit of considering major parameters like - market trends, customer preferences, and competitor activity - use data analytics to gain insights into customer behaviors
43. Learn to build strong collaborations with – people, vendors, suppliers and organizations those who can help you scale up effectively AND to gain new perspectives and insights into complex problems to help you make more informed decisions and develop a more effective strategy for your business
44. Identify the actions that matter in the areas that are most important
45. Learn to read and identify as well as interpret - signals from your customers and employees – then figure out how you will respond for biggest impact
46. Learn to Focus on the most important problem that needs to be addressed
47. Ask yourself all the time - What is the biggest opportunity we need to work on and what is the biggest challenge we need to overcome – WHY these are important to address & what we need to do to address this opportunity
48. Explore all the choices and options that you have identified – weigh pros & cons
49. Identify and do deep risk assessment and analysis
50. Always take your major plans through – implantability check or ease of execution, financial feasibility, sustainability and viability
51. Always try to create Distinctiveness by focusing on - What can you bring to the moment that others can't and What do you want people to feel, think, and do because of your intervention
52. Ensure to Master the capabilities required and keep reinventing yourself as well as the skills of all your team members
53. Create alignment between elements of the strategy Prioritize your tasks
54. Learn to Constantly optimize and consolidate before you move up and forward
55. Take complete ownership of your all decisions and actions - Understand the consequences
56. Make Strategic Decisions Based on Evidence and data - use reliable sources to gather relevant information -Carefully analyze the data to identify critical patterns and trends -Consider all alternatives and evaluate each one for potential outcomes -Based on their potential impact and feasibility, prioritize the available options.
57. Outline an action plan and the steps you must follow to implement the chosen alternative.
58. Break down problems and do a robust Cost-benefit analysis
59. After implementation, monitor the progress of the project and make necessary adjustments.
60. Learn to Say No – to all those requests that distract your focus from your most important goals

All of the Following is taken from My BLOG - Ways to make better decisions https://successunlimited-mantra.com/index.php/blog/ways-to-make-better-decisions 

12 steps of problem solving – because every tough-decision that you need to take is a problem to be solved

1. Understand the problem completely – many times because we do not understand the problem fully and we start taking actions to solve it - as a result we solve the wrong problem and do not get the right results. You must be able to see the problem from different perspectives and different angles to understand it.
2. Identify the outcomes you want in specific terms
3. Explore what options, alternatives, possibilities – which are in your area of control to be able to implement
4. Note down what resources you have and what resources you need
5. Make a list of people you can seek help and guidance from
6. How choose the best-combination of many possibilities
7. Then implement the chosen model
8. Monitor and track your actions
9. Improvise in case the initial thought about action is not giving you the result
10. Celebrate your success
11. Be flexible to change your goal or the modus operandi
12. Follow your values to decide certain actions – even if it does not give you immediate gratification.

14 Barriers to decision-making

1. Not having the right maturity and exposure
2. You are trying take decision when it is beyond your area of influence and control
3. Fear of failure
4. Fear of unknown
5. Overanalyzing
6. Information overload - unable to sift and sort and organize and structure the information
7. Trying to get all the information - which in any case never happens
8.Overthinking and getting nowhere
9. Your past experience which had major negative impact
10. Your perception about what can be and how it should be
11. You are trying to take decisions while being overwhelmed by the problem
12.You are under prepared
13. You have neither learned about nor understood the situations fully
14.You are convinced of TINA - there are no alternatives

25+ Ideas How to use 6 Thinking Hat [by Edward de Bono] for brainstorming to make powerful choices and take great tough decisions

9 basic reasons to use the blue hat - this is used to facilitate, regulate and manage the thinking and brain-storming process by

1. Clarifying and freezing the agenda
2. Fixing the outcomes of each session or meeting
3. Controlling the time spent on each element while brainstorming
4. At the end of each session next step - the way forward is decided
5. Keeping everyone's focus on the issue
6. Ensuring everyone gets to give their inputs
7. Maintaining discipline
8. Deciding how time to allocate for each hat - for getting the pre-decided outcome
9. Crystalize the decision-taken and actions-needed - in SMART way

7 questions for White hat - is used - to identify - Sticking with facts and figures - focus objectively - on what is essential

1. What information is available
2. What is unknown at this point of time
3. What information would we like to have?
4. What information do we need?
5. What information is missing?
6. What type of information is disputed and not clear
7. The degree, type and amount of information needed - to enable us to take the action

Why Red hat - gut-feelings, sixth sense and intuition - this hat is used in dire-emergencies and by the top leadership where the buck-stops.

• This is used when decision must be taken - irrespective of the data and information available - in cases only ambiguousness and complexity rules

6 reason to use Black hat - this is about - challenging all the solutions proposed to exercise due-diligence for identifying all the challenges, difficulties and problems and risks and other negative consequence

1. For identifying all the weak points in the ideas shortlisted
2. For finding all the negatives of alternatives suggested
3. Creating solutions to mitigate the weakness of the idea
4. Identifying the down sides and negative consequences of the ideas that are weak
5. For assessing decision by revisiting and challenging the assumptions
6. Identifying why an alternative suggested is not right to go ahead

5 reasons to use yellow hat - this is about identifying why - the solutions short-listed - would work AND to know the positives, the benefits, the advantages and feasibility

1.Positives about the idea
2.Alternative ideas
3.Solutions for challenges raised by reality check
4.Identifying the benefits of the ideas identified
5.What is the applicability and the suitability for the alternative ideas identified
6.All reasoning must be backed with logical and actionable and verifiable rationale.

7 reasons to use green hat - this is the - creative and innovative phase of decision-making - where thinking freely, disruptively, radically different, challenging assumptions and perceptions

1. To come out with various new ideas and solutions, further alternatives, other ways, possibilities
2. And how can we make all that we have decided - execute, implement and make it work - and how can we overcome the challenges and obstacles
3. Improving and building on all the ideas listed
4. Identifying all the possible alternatives
5. Creating solutions for all the downsides of the ideas brain-stormed
6. Create as many alternatives as possible
7. This phase does not have logic - this is the time when your imagination must run wild.

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