Strategic Sensing
It’s difficult to be a great strategic leader if you’re not actually good at strategy yourself.
It’s not about being an individual savant. Rather, it’s being able to say things to the team like, “We seem to be thinking most about [one part of the challenge], but we need to be thinking more about this other aspect.” Or. “We should be applying another lens to solve this problem.”
One gets that kind of knowledge and experience from continual study and observation of strategy. I’m reminded of how Kevin Durant, one of the most accomplished scorers in NBA history, claims to spend a substantial portion of his time away from the court…watching others play basketball. Or how master craftsmen and great chefs are constantly observing their peers to borrow ideas for their own toolkits.
Surely, reading books and research is part of the effort to build one’s knowledge of strategy, but the learning process shouldn’t be a detached, ivory-tower exercise. Instead, great strategic leaders build their skills by getting their hands dirty.
As business professor Henry Mintzberg writes in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, “Effective strategists are not people who abstract themselves from the daily details but quite the opposite: they are the ones who immerse themselves in it, while being able to abstract the strategic messages from it. Perceiving the forest from the trees is not the right metaphor at all…because opportunities tend to be hidden under the leaves.”
Practically, seeing the opportunities “under the leaves” means being in direct conversation with customers, external stakeholders, and team members up, down, and across the organization. It means purchasing competitors’ products so that you can touch, feel, and experience how they work. It means having an always-on radar for ideas.
That is, directly engaging the senses so that you can sense the great strategic moves in real time.
Great strategic leaders don’t wait on the neatly packaged, synthesized, and abstracted quarterly report for inspiration. Besides, a company memo is probably the least fruitful place to find a compelling idea!