Create Value with Strategic Thinking

Strategic planning sessions are common in most organizations, and valuable to bring together the sharpest minds to chart the course for your future. But what if you could establish a way to capitalize on your team members’ best thinking more frequently than your annual planning sessions? A strategic-thinking boot camp can align, advance, and measure the strategic-thinking skills of your team, resulting in decision-making that is faster, more effective, and even less costly on your critical business decisions.

Empower your team to more efficiently solve real problems

Organizations that make a commitment to strategic thinking can change the way their employees approach their work each day. Additionally, this approach can bring sound ideas from all levels of the business to address real strategic business needs, such as how to:

• Overcome current market barriers
• Develop effective sales teams through internal restructuring
• Determine the most efficient process to recognize revenue
• Increase market share in a waning economy
• Build a distribution strategy to launch a new product

This does not happen overnight, but a dedicated focus to strategic thinking can enable decision-making that supports your business strategy and improves your decisions’ effectiveness and efficiency.

Teaching your team to think strategically

Your talented team can make better decisions when they are taught to think strategically. By providing a consistent framework and language for decision-making, you can avoid disagreements about the process and spend more time on the task at hand. Some organizations build a foundation for strategic thinking through a boot camp. This five-day program enables you to reach your core team through an intensive, thought-provoking experience. To spread the concepts, abilities, and culture of strategic thinking, a three-tiered certification can engage a broader audience.

In the first level of certification, team members learn to capitalize on the strengths of other team members by taking full inventory of capabilities and working styles. Basic strategic-thinking elements can be established through a series of e-Learning courses based assigned readings to engage all participants in common terminology. In this phase, participants work in project teams to begin applying those principles.

The next level includes the actual boot camp and more specialized e-Learning courses, providing a more intensive experience through which team members build upon skills from the first level to apply a consistent approach for framing up and solving complex problems. After learning the FOCUS decision-making theory, these project managers work in teams to tackle a current strategic decision in their business. Outcomes from this level can be presented to the senior leadership team and even put into action across the organization.

The third level empowers the new strategic-thinking approach to spread through the organization. Team members who have experienced both levels, and contributed to a defined level of business success, can train strategic-thinking concepts to others in the business. They champion the program and spread a consistent language across the broader organization.

The opportunity

Many organizations are discovering how to accelerate their success through a strategic-thinking boot camp and approach. You can read one example here, or contact us today.