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 Strategy Deck That Collected Dust
Danielle Moreau had done everything the business books told her to do.
She’d hired a consultant. She’d taken her leadership team on a two-day offsite in the Catskills. They’d filled whiteboards with SWOT analyses, drafted a 47-page strategy document, and returned to their offices in Brooklyn with a mission statement laminated on cardstock.
Six months later, nothing had changed. Her mid-stage fintech startup was still lurching from one fire to the next. Product decisions contradicted marketing priorities. Engineering resources were spread across 11 initiatives, none of them fully funded. Her COO quit, citing “a lack of strategic clarity.”
“I had the strategy,” she told me over coffee last spring. “What I didn’t have was the thinking.”
Danielle’s experience is not unusual. It is, in fact, the norm. And the distinction she stumbled into — the gap between having a strategy and thinking strategically — sits at the center of decades of research that most professionals have never encountered.
You may also Like
What Henry Mintzberg Saw Coming in 1994
Long before Silicon Valley turned “strategy” into a synonym for slide decks, a Canadian management scholar named Henry Mintzberg was warning that organizations had confused the map with the territory.
In his landmark 1994 study, Mintzberg found that only 25 percent of companies considered their strategic planning processes effective. The problem, he argued, was structural. 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,” Mintzberg wrote in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.
That single sentence explains why so many 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.
Mintzberg’s insight reshaped the field. Strategy, he argued, doesn’t emerge from an annual offsite. It emerges from a mindset — a way of processing information, making tradeoffs, and learning from outcomes that operates continuously, not on a calendar.
The Integrative Thinkers
If Mintzberg diagnosed the disease, Roger Martin offered a treatment.
You may also Like
Martin, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and the world’s No. 1 ranked 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.
Martin called this capacity “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. Giant global corporations kept hiring his team of 30-somethings to solve their hardest problems. Why? Because those problems “slopped across traditional categorical boundaries,” Martin explained. They didn’t 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 — from retail to healthcare to hospitality. The integrative thinkers shared a common trait: when presented with unpalatable either/or choices, they challenged themselves to find options that didn’t yet exist.
This is what separates a strategic mindset from mere analytical ability. Analysis can tell you which of two options is better. Strategic thinking asks whether there’s a third option you haven’t considered — and then builds it.
What the Research Says a Strategic Mindset Actually Is
At George Washington University, researcher Ellen Goldman has spent years studying what strategic thinking looks like in practice. Her work has produced some of the most granular data available on how the skill actually develops.
In a phenomenological study of CEOs in the healthcare industry, Goldman identified three distinct developmental patterns that strategic thinkers progress through: 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 the competency models that large organizations use to evaluate strategic thinking, she found that most either treat it as a standalone box to check or bury it under unrelated categories. The result is that organizations say they value strategic thinking but have no reliable way to develop or measure it.
Goldman distilled the practice down to three core behaviors: asking questions from multiple points of view to gain perspective, applying a rational framework to determine actions, and reflecting after acting to determine what could be improved.
That third element — reflection — turns out to be critical. Strategic thinking is not a one-time act. It is a loop. You sense, you choose, you act, you learn, and you begin again with better information.
Why Most People Think They’re Strategic (and Aren’t)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: being busy is not the same as being strategic.
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 this responsiveness is their strategy.
It isn’t. It’s triage.
A strategic mindset requires the discipline to step back from the immediate and ask a different set of 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 the difference in how a tactical thinker and a strategic thinker might respond to declining customer satisfaction scores. The tactical response: hire more support staff, create a new escalation path, add a customer success manager. The strategic response: investigate whether the dissatisfaction stems from product quality, mismatched customer expectations, serving the wrong segment entirely, or subsidizing complexity with headcount rather than eliminating the complexity at its source.
Both responses involve work. Only one changes the underlying dynamics.
The Four Moves That Define Strategic Thinkers
Across the research — from Mintzberg’s critique of planning to Martin’s study of integrative thinkers to Goldman’s developmental models — 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 — the kind of intelligence that comes from talking to customers, reading competitive signals, and noticing second-order effects that don’t show up in dashboards.
Choose. Make explicit tradeoffs. Martin’s research showed that the best leaders don’t 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’re 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 “shadow portfolio” of 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 don’t just execute and move on. They design experiments, name their assumptions, and build feedback loops that allow the strategy to evolve faster than the environment changes.
How a Strategic Mindset Shows Up on a Tuesday Afternoon
Theory is useful, but a strategic mindset lives in daily behavior, not annual planning cycles.
People who think strategically start meetings differently. They open with “what decision are we making, and what changes if we choose A versus B?” rather than reviewing a status report. They clarify constraints and tradeoffs early — budget, talent, risk tolerance, timeline — and they name what will be deprioritized.
They ask “compared to what?” relentlessly. Every proposal gets evaluated against alternatives, including the option of doing nothing. They connect individual initiatives to a broader thesis about how the organization wins.
And they reduce what might be called “decision debt” — the accumulated cost of choices being postponed. In the same way that technical debt compounds in software, unresolved strategic questions compound in organizations, creating drag that no amount of execution speed can overcome.
These are not heroic behaviors. They are habits — and like all habits, they can be built through deliberate practice.
Five Practices That Actually Build the Skill
Goldman’s research confirms what practitioners have long suspected: strategic thinking is developed through practice, not exposure. Sitting in senior meetings doesn’t make you strategic any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.
Develop an external narrative. Set a monthly or quarterly rhythm to summarize what’s changing outside your organization: customer behavior, competitor moves, regulatory signals, technology shifts. The discipline isn’t collecting news. It’s 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.” “We will accept slower feature velocity to improve reliability.” The discomfort you feel writing these is a signal that you’re actually making choices rather than deferring them.
Adopt a portfolio lens. Stop evaluating projects individually. Instead, look at the full portfolio: How many bets are core versus adjacent versus exploratory? Where are you overinvested? What is consuming leadership attention without strategic return?
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 kind of learning loops Goldman identified as essential to strategic development.
Write decision memos, not slide decks. Mintzberg’s critique of planning included a pointed observation about the limitations of formal presentation formats. Short written memos force rigor: problem framing, options considered, tradeoffs, assumptions, and success metrics. They also create institutional memory, reducing the organizational habit of revisiting the same debates every quarter.
The Leadership Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Organizations get the strategic mindset they reward.
If every initiative is treated as equally urgent, nobody can be strategic. If teams are punished for experiments that don’t work, they’ll stop testing assumptions and start defending plans. If metrics reward local optimization — each department hitting its own numbers — strategy will fragment into a collection of silos pursuing disconnected goals.
Leaders who want strategic thinking from their teams need to do three things: make the logic of winning legible so people can actually apply it, protect focus by enforcing priorities rather than adding to them, and reward intelligent tradeoffs — including the decision to stop or narrow an initiative when the strategic return is weak.
Martin’s research offers a useful lens here. Integrative thinking doesn’t happen in cultures that punish ambiguity. If leaders demand certainty and punish the exploration of opposing ideas, they get compliance. They don’t get strategy.
The Bottom Line
Danielle, the fintech founder from Brooklyn, eventually figured it out. She stopped treating strategy as a document and started treating it as a discipline. She required every project proposal to include a tradeoff statement. She built a monthly “sensing” practice where her team analyzed competitive and customer signals. She began running pre-mortems before major commitments.
Eighteen months later, her company had narrowed from 11 initiatives to four. Revenue per employee had increased by 40 percent. And her new COO told me something striking: “The strategy didn’t change. The way people thought about it did.”
A strategic mindset is not a personality trait, a job title, or a planning methodology. It is a disciplined habit — built through sensing patterns, making explicit choices, aligning resources, and learning continuously. The research from Mintzberg, Martin, and Goldman converges on a single point: strategic thinking is a skill, and like all skills, it responds to practice.
If you want to know whether you or your team are actually thinking strategically, ask one question: Are our decisions making us more capable of winning tomorrow than we are today?
If the answer is unclear, the solution isn’t to work harder. It’s to think differently.