Before starting a task, I like to think through the steps and possible challenges.
I often set long-term goals and break them into smaller, manageable actions.
I consider different options before making important decisions.
When things don’t go as planned, I adjust my strategy instead of giving up.
I regularly reflect on what’s working and what needs to change.
I think about how today’s actions will affect my future success.
I like to anticipate problems before they happen
I believe planning ahead gives me a better chance of reaching my goals.
I stay focused on the big picture, even when I face short-term setbacks.
I prefer to take thoughtful action rather than rush into things unprepared.
The gap between having a strategy and thinking strategically
In 1994, Canadian management scholar Henry Mintzberg published a finding that should have changed how every organization approaches strategy: only 25% of companies considered their strategic planning processes effective.
The problem, Mintzberg argued, was structural. Organizations had confused two fundamentally different activities. Strategic planning is analysis — breaking things into parts, running the numbers, filling in the templates. Strategic thinking is synthesis — seeing the whole picture, sensing patterns, making creative leaps.
“The disassociation of thinking from acting lies close to the root of planning’s problem,” he wrote in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.
That single sentence explains why organizations with beautiful strategy decks still operate in reactive chaos. The document becomes a substitute for the discipline. Planning replaces thinking. And the people closest to customers, competitors, and operational reality — the ones who could actually inform strategy — are excluded from the process entirely.
I think this is still the most important insight in the strategy literature, and it is over thirty years old. The fact that most organizations have not absorbed it tells you something about how difficult genuine strategic thinking actually is.
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What recent research shows about the strategic mindset
Mintzberg’s work was based on organizational observation. More recently, researchers have started measuring the strategic mindset as a psychological construct with quantifiable effects.
A 2025 study published in Nature’s npj Science of Learning conducted four studies with 7,475 adolescent and adult students from over 30 schools in Singapore. The researchers defined a strategic mindset as an orientation toward asking oneself questions that elicit the access and use of task-appropriate methods, especially in moments of difficulty or unproductivity.
The findings showed that a strategic mindset predicted and promoted effective learning and academic performance. Students who habitually asked themselves “Is there a better way to do this?” and “What strategy would work here?” outperformed peers who simply worked harder without metacognitive reflection.
This is a meaningful finding because it separates strategic thinking from intelligence or effort. The strategic mindset is not about being smarter. It is about habitually stepping back to evaluate your approach rather than pushing forward on autopilot. And that distinction applies whether you are a student taking an exam or a CEO making a capital allocation decision.
Roger Martin and the integrative thinkers
If Mintzberg diagnosed the disease, Roger Martin offered a treatment.
Martin, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and ranked the world’s No. 1 management thinker by Thinkers50 in 2017, spent more than six years studying how exceptional leaders make decisions. His finding was deceptively simple: the best strategic thinkers refuse to accept trade-offs at face value.
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Martin called this “integrative thinking” — the ability to hold two opposing ideas in tension and, rather than choosing one, generate a creative resolution that contains elements of both but is superior to either.
He first noticed the pattern in 1991 while running Monitor Company, a strategy consulting firm. Global corporations kept hiring his team of 30-somethings to solve their hardest problems. Why? Because those problems “slopped across traditional categorical boundaries.” They did not fit neatly into marketing or operations or finance. They required a different kind of mind.
The research, published in his 2007 book The Opposable Mind, followed leaders across industries. The integrative thinkers shared a common trait: when presented with unpalatable either/or choices, they challenged themselves to find options that did not yet exist.
This is what separates a strategic mindset from analytical ability. Analysis can tell you which of two options is better. Strategic thinking asks whether there is a third option you have not considered — and then builds it.
Goldman’s developmental research
At George Washington University, researcher Ellen Goldman has produced some of the most granular data available on how strategic thinking actually develops.
In a phenomenological study of CEOs in the healthcare industry, Goldman identified three distinct developmental patterns: understanding the broader system, practicing rational planning frameworks, and completing a hierarchy of increasingly complex challenges.
Her research also uncovered a troubling gap. When Goldman examined competency models that large organizations use to evaluate strategic thinking, she found that most either treat it as a standalone checkbox or bury it under unrelated categories. Organizations say they value strategic thinking but have no reliable way to develop or measure it.
Goldman distilled the practice into three core behaviors: asking questions from multiple viewpoints to gain perspective, applying a rational framework to determine actions, and reflecting after acting to determine what could be improved.
That third element — reflection — connects directly to the Singapore study’s findings about metacognitive questioning. Strategic thinking is not a one-time act. It is a loop: sense, choose, act, learn, begin again with better information.
Four moves that define strategic thinkers
Across the research — from Mintzberg’s critique to Martin’s integrative thinkers to Goldman’s developmental models to the Singapore metacognition data — a consistent pattern emerges. Strategic thinking operates through four repeatable moves.
Sense. See the system, not just the symptoms. This means developing what Mintzberg called “soft data” awareness — intelligence from talking to customers, reading competitive signals, and noticing second-order effects that do not show up in dashboards.
Choose. Make explicit tradeoffs. Martin’s research showed that the best leaders do not just pick from available options. They interrogate the options themselves. They ask what must be true for a given approach to work, and they name what they are giving up — deliberately, not by default.
Align. Connect choices to resources. Strategy fails when the organization’s real priorities — what it actually funds, measures, and rewards — diverge from its stated intent. Alignment means pruning the initiatives that persist because of history or politics, not strategic logic.
Learn. Treat strategy as a set of testable hypotheses. Goldman’s research on reflection as a core competency supports this: strategic thinkers design experiments, name assumptions, and build feedback loops that allow strategy to evolve faster than the environment changes.
Why most people think they are strategic and are not
Most professionals confuse urgency with importance. They spend their weeks responding to the loudest signal — the angry customer, the board question, the competitive announcement — and convince themselves that responsiveness is strategy. It is not. It is triage.
A strategic mindset requires the discipline to step back from the immediate and ask different questions. Not “What do I need to do today?” but “What decisions, made consistently over time, will put us in a fundamentally stronger position?”
Consider how a tactical thinker and a strategic thinker respond to declining customer satisfaction. The tactical response: hire more support staff, create a new escalation path. The strategic response: investigate whether dissatisfaction stems from product quality, mismatched expectations, serving the wrong segment, or subsidizing complexity with headcount rather than eliminating it at the source.
Both responses involve work. Only one changes the underlying dynamics. The 2025 Singapore data suggests this is the same distinction at every level: working harder versus pausing to ask whether a different approach would be more effective.
Five practices that build the skill
Goldman’s research confirms what practitioners have long suspected: strategic thinking develops through practice, not exposure. Sitting in senior meetings does not make you strategic any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.
Develop an external narrative. Set a monthly rhythm to summarize what is changing outside your organization: customer behavior, competitor moves, regulatory signals, technology shifts. The discipline is not collecting news. It is building a point of view about what changes the basis of competition.
Write tradeoff statements. Force yourself and your team to make tradeoffs explicit: “To achieve X, we will deprioritize Y.” The discomfort you feel writing these is a signal that you are actually making choices rather than deferring them.
Adopt a portfolio lens. Stop evaluating projects individually. Look at the full portfolio: how many bets are core versus adjacent versus exploratory? Where are you overinvested?
Run pre-mortems. Before committing to any major initiative, ask: “Imagine this failed 18 months from now. What caused it?” This surfaces hidden assumptions and encourages the learning loops Goldman identified as essential to strategic development.
Write decision memos, not slide decks. Mintzberg’s critique included a pointed observation about formal presentation formats. Short written memos force rigor: problem framing, options considered, tradeoffs, assumptions, success metrics. They also create institutional memory that reduces the habit of revisiting the same debates quarterly.
The honest limitations of strategic mindset research
I want to address what this literature does not establish well.
Mintzberg’s 25% figure is widely cited but methodologically imprecise. It is based on organizational observation and survey data from the early 1990s, not controlled experimentation. The directional finding — that most strategic planning processes fail to produce strategic thinking — has been supported by subsequent research, but the specific number should be treated as illustrative.
Martin’s integrative thinking research is descriptive, not prescriptive. He studied leaders who already demonstrated exceptional strategic ability and described what they did. Whether their approach can be reliably taught to others at scale is a different question with less evidence behind it.
Goldman’s samples are small and sector-specific. Her phenomenological studies of healthcare CEOs provide rich qualitative data but do not establish generalizable developmental pathways. The progression she identified may look different in technology, manufacturing, or nonprofit contexts.
The Singapore study is promising but specific. Seven thousand participants is a strong sample, but the research measured academic performance, not organizational strategy. Extrapolating from classroom metacognition to boardroom decision-making requires assumptions the data does not directly support.
Cognitive bias research complicates the picture. A 2025 review in SAGE Open examined how cognitive biases affect managerial decision-making, finding that even experienced strategists are susceptible to confirmation bias, anchoring, and status quo bias in ways that structured strategic processes cannot fully overcome.
I think the most honest summary is this: the strategic mindset is real, measurable, and developable through practice. The specific methods for building it are supported by evidence of varying quality. And no amount of strategic thinking eliminates the role of timing, luck, and structural factors in determining outcomes.
The bottom line
A strategic mindset is not a personality trait, a job title, or a planning methodology. It is a disciplined cognitive habit built through sensing patterns, making explicit choices, aligning resources, and learning continuously.
Mintzberg showed that 75% of organizations fail to make their planning processes effective because they confuse analysis with synthesis. Martin demonstrated that the best strategic thinkers refuse false either/or tradeoffs. Goldman identified reflection as the critical developmental mechanism. And recent research with 7,475 students confirmed that the habit of asking “Is there a better approach?” produces measurably better outcomes than simply working harder.
The strategic mindset responds to practice. The question is whether you are willing to slow down long enough to build it. Developing a growth mindset is often the prerequisite: the belief that strategic thinking is a skill you can improve, not a talent you either have or lack.
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