How To Unlock Your Strategic Mind

Strategists think differently

Author

Jasmine Bina
October 10, 2023

I have a question for you: What does it mean to be good at thinking? 

If you’re in a thinking industry, meaning you get paid for your ideas, or you get paid to think about stuff and come up with elegant solutions, how do you make sure you’re actually good at the act of thinking?

Most people believe it's knowledge, and while knowledge is certainly a critical input for good thinking, it’s just an input. It’s not the actual practice of being able to think well. 

Good thinking, and especially good strategic thinking, is the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an effective and efficient manner.

In other words, it’s a skill that needs to constantly be developed. Yet we don’t treat it as one. 

In our newest house episode of Unseen Unknown, Jean-Louis Rawlence, Chief Strategy Officer and my partner at Concept Bureau, breaks down his steps for how to think strategically, and to keep getting better and better at it. 

We cover the first principles that are especially important for strategists, how to organize information so that it leads to rich world-building, the right way to look for levers in the system, our go-to mental models, and the line between sentiment and semantics. 

Don’t take your ability to think strategically for granted. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but there is a lot more power available to us when we start to cultivate our thinking skills.

Strategic thinking is a constant practice, and we're sharing our most effective methodologies with you.

Or read the full episode transcript while you listen here.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

The Best Medicine

Here's what we've been consuming.

Prozac Nation, Meet Lexapro Sweatshirts (New York Times): "Last year, Ms. Kelly forayed into fashion with a line of mental-health-themed merchandise. The selection included a “Depressed but Make It Hot” shirt and a variety of antidepressant-themed sweatshirts reading “Lexapro,” “Prozac” and “Zoloft.” They sold out quickly. Ms. Kelly is not the only creative professional bringing mental health into the fashion sphere. During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a 25 percent increase in people suffering from anxiety and depression globally, according to the World Health Organization. Designers, in turn, responded to the crisis through garments."

Get Your Science Out of Here: When Does Invoking Science in the Marketing of Consumer Products Backfire? (Journal of Consumer Research): "Although consumers view the scientific process as competent, they also perceive it as cold. Across 10 experimental studies, we demonstrate that these lay beliefs impact consumers’ reactions to marketers touting the science behind their brands. Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic products and attributes, reducing product valuation."

Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s (The Economist): "People’s principles were expected to align as countries got richer. What happened? [...] On measure after measure—from thinking that children ought to be obedient, to tolerance of homosexuality, to agreeing that “when religion and science conflict, religion is always right”—European countries have moved in the direction of greater individualism and secularism in the past 25 years. That is also true of America... In Orthodox, Latin American and Islamic countries support for democracy plummeted."

Pleasure Activism (Creative Destruction): "Using pain as the organizing principle of the modern world has lots of implications [...] With so many new challenges and uncertainties thrown at us, we are in dire need of new, positive narratives. If pain is the organizing principle of the modern world then our visions and ideas of a better future must replace it with something new."

Brands Are Missing Out On TikTok's Fastest Growing Generation (AdAge): "Brands are doing a poor job marketing to Gen X, especially on social, missing a big opportunity to reach what is expected to become the most affluent generation [...] Gen Xers are commonly going through “a rollercoaster of life stages” including supporting their children in secondary school, study or work; menopause; divorce or second marriages; rebuilding their lives in an “empty nest;” and caring for aging parents. “All these stages involve emotional upheaval, new horizons, new costs and new spending habits.""

Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect (The Economist): "Living to 100 today is not unheard of, but is still rare. In America and Britain centenarians make up around 0.03% of the population. Should the latest efforts to prolong life reach their potential, living to see your 100th birthday could become the norm; making it to 120 could become a perfectly reasonable aspiration. More exciting still, those extra years would be healthy." 

Extra-Ordinary

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

I often talk about the critical role of optimism when it comes to our work in strategy and futurism, but I get pushback.

The dissenting voices come from within my team and without, with people telling me that optimism is naive or disconnected with reality.

My response to them is that although optimistic futures may feel unlikely, they are no less possible than pessimistic futures. And you can't build the future without the optimists. It's the optimistic ideas that win, that move culture forward. Strategy and futurism hinge on creativity more than anything else, and true creativity is itself an optimistic act (not to mention the fact that optimists live up to 15% longer.)

But still, I've felt a nagging weakness in my optimism-or-die approach. There is something flat in the assumption, a missing but necessary tension - the measure of salt in the optimism cake.

David Karpf's recent article "The Curse of the Long Boom" may have answered my nagging doubt:

"My main critique [on techno-optimism] focuses on what the perspective obscures. “Look on the bright side” might be a fine piece of personal life advice, but it also diverts attention from hard pragmatic choices. It’s an outlook that tends to comfort and reassure the comfortable.

"As an example, consider income inequality. The libertarian techno-optimists of 1997 insisted that we were about to generate so much wealth that everyone would inevitably prosper.

"They also tended to argue against increasing taxes on the wealthy, since this would be bad for venture capitalists and slow the pace of innovation. But, mostly, they invited us to ignore tax policy and focus instead on the awesome economic gains that would inevitably be unlocked by nanotechnology [...]

"It calls to mind a great line from Bojack Horseman: “When you look at some[thing] through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like … flags.”"

What people like me often forget is that responsible optimism means not just predicting the best possible outcomes, but admitting that the best possible outcomes can only happen if we accommodate for the worst possible human behavior.

If people are greedy now, they will likely be greedy in the future. If power tends to coalesce at the top, if identity trumps empathy, if a population thinks zero-sum, if fear drives action... if any of these things are true today, they will likely be true tomorrow. 

But that doesn't mean an optimistic future isn't likely.

It means the true job of an optimist is to change people. We can change technology and markets and governance and access on the back of wild innovations, but if we're not changing people, we're not winning. 

Changing people is the real work.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.