How to Be Seen as a Strategic Thinker

Idea

There’s a fundamental idea that underlines all great strategic thinkers, which comes from a book called the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. If you’re going to become world class at anything, including strategic thinking, use The Four P’s:

Passion:
You’re not going to become really good at something unless you’re passionate about it. It’s hard to be great at something you don’t enjoy.

Persistence:
Malcolm Gladwell and others have researched persistence and the number they typically mention is about 10 years or 10,000 hours spent on your area of expertise. You have to be persistent to spend 10 years or 10,000 hours on something.

Practice:
More specifically, deliberate practice, which involves having a coach, mentor, friend, colleague, or outside expert, push you to practice better every day and to constantly improve.

Pattern Recognition

Example

Pattern recognition is the super skill of great strategic thinkers and experts in any field. For example:

• Great soccer players (or football players, depending on what country you’re in), can see the entire field and know where to kick the ball so it will land in the right place for the next person to move in on it.
• Great musicians can look at a sheet of music and hear the music in their head.
• Two chess grand masters playing a match together can see patterns of 100s’ or 1,000’s of moves ahead.

Action

A great strategic thinker has the ability to see patterns where other people don’t see them. For your ability to connect those dots, you have to have the dots before you can connect them. The way to get to this point is by filling your mind with the “adjacent new”: new ideas and information.

Spend 15 minutes a day doing something new. For example, read a book or article, listen to a podcast outside your area of expertise, get up from your desk and go talk to other people in the office, go and meet somebody new.

Constantly solicit new information and ideas, and eventually you’ll be able to connect those with ideas you already have, a pattern will emerge, and that is what it takes to be recognized as an outstanding strategic thinker.