How To Develop Your Strategic Thinking Skills and Stay Ahead

Cross the boundary of your comfort zone to think about an idea to its extreme without mental guardrails to put it down.

Credit: Author

Strategic thinking is such a critical skill in life, and yet a lot of us hear about it for the first time in our lives through our managers “You are great at execution, but you need to start thinking strategically.”

Now a corporate mumbo jumbo, strategic thinking wasn’t a popular concept in the early years of my career. I kind of assumed that strategic thinking was reserved for corporates and people higher up in the company who needed to make crucial decisions around the future of an organization. It never occurred to me that thinking strategically isn’t a skill you acquire when you reach a certain position, it’s a skill you build to get to a certain position.

I also believed that when I was ready to climb the corporate ladder, my manager would give me the training to help me build my strategic thinking skills and the opportunities to practice those skills. Call me naive, but that was the corporate world I lived in back then. Much has changed since, but one thing has remained constant. Strategic thinking is as important now (and maybe even more) as it was many years ago.