How do we move away from spending 95% of our work time on execution mode?

How do we Instead increase our strategic thinking in organizations and ask big questions?

We don’t have to spend an equal amount of time doing strategic thinking vs execution, but if we could increase it to 15%- 20% it would give us some fantastic results.

Of course, this may not be our fault, as perhaps our brain is wired to be more in execution mode, as we used to have to hunt and gather and not get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger, hence that meant lots of execution.

That scenario has changed, and we no longer need to apply as much execution, we should instead stop and think more and ask the big questions.

This applies at work as well, we should make asking big questions the norm at work, and do it without sounding rude.

There is nothing wrong with this approach, and if we did it more we could actually get to the root cause of things and then execute.

This means that we need to create interventions that:

1) make this the norm
2) that we help default this type of thinking at work
3) that we remove the tons and tons of meetings for the sake of being present
4) that we have good frameworks for asking the big questions
5) that we experiment and test our assumptions with the group
6) that we get focus time and time to think
7) that we enable the office environment to get distractions away
8)that we focus on real outcomes
9)that we design fun and variability into work
10)that we give people autonomy

What else would you add to increase strategic thinking over execution?

p.s — I don’t know if the number is 95%-5% of course it’s for representation purposes, but I am sure it’s skewed somewhat in that way.

Robert

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