Thursday, March 25, 2010

Intuitive and Analytical Approaches

Strategic Planning ideally is comprised of a combination of intuitive and analytical thinking. Taken individually, these two approaches are useful, but incomplete in addressing the challenges of planning.

At its core, planning is ultimately a creative activity. Planners start with a clean slate, or even from within a context of past performance and established infrastructure, but with a potentially infinite number of possibilities available for future growth. "Analysis" comes from the Greek analyein, meaning to loosen or break up. Analysis often involves taking a difficult problem and breaking it up into its parts in order to better understand how things work and how they fit together. In mathematics an analytical proof is often created by assuming an outcome and then deducing a series of irrefutable steps that lead up to that conclusion. In this way, analysis is tremendously useful in strategic thinking because, once you know what you want to achieve, analysis is a good way to break up that vision into "strategies" that describe how you will achieve that vision.

But how do we achieve that vision in the first place? Vision is something that cannot be deduced or analyzed. The vision is something that forms the fundamental foundation upon which strategic planning is based. The vision is typically arrived at through intuitive thinking. "Intuition" comes from the Latin intuiri, (in + tueri) meaning "to look at" or contemplate. It seems appropriate that our "vision" comes from the kind of thinking that means "to look at." Intuitive and analytical thinking are opposites in that intuitive thinking is non-deductive, non-rational and is more holistic. Intuitive thought is where creativity comes from. Analytical thought can be creative in its approach, but ultimately it is not creating anything, but rather understanding complex things in terms of their parts.

Holistic strategic planning incorporates both intuitive and analytical thinking in its approach. Intuitive thinking is necessary to create the vision and to drive innovation, perhaps by perceiving competitive opportunities that may not fall under an industry's normal way of doing business. Analytical thinking picks up from there and helps us to articulate the objectives and strategies that we will employ to achieve the vision. Analytical thinking is used further in organizational alignment and individual action planning which breaks up the strategies further into action plans for each individual within the organization. Finally, analytical thinking is used in performance measurement to help us measure how well we are achieving our vision and to correct our strategies as they are tested against the realities of the real world.

Intuitive thinking does not just occur at the beginning of the process, when developing the vision statement. It is apparent throughout. The design of the environment scan toolkit is based on exercises that break participants outside of their boxes of preconception and analytical approaches. The toolkit represents different ways of looking at a problem in order to stimulate intuitive thinking and innovation. The toolkit does this by taking the strategic planning challenge and turning it on its head. We approach the problem from close in with an internal analysis of the organization, internal trends, resources, strengths and weaknesses. Our perspective widens when we take on an inspection of Porters' Five Forces of competition. Who, in our immediate sphere of competition, has competitive advantage? What are the threats of substitution, or imbalances of power between suppliers and customers? We then zoom out further to take a 30,000 foot level view of the environment with the STEEPL future trends exercise. This approach has us looking at Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political and Legal trends that affect not only our business, but represent global trends in all areas of human endeavor. Finally, we employ scenario developments which use story telling approaches to break us out of analytical thinking modes. By telling stories about our possible future states, we visualize (intuit) what the world will look like and use free association exercises to ask questions about those future scenarios from a number of different perspectives.

These exercises all push us to use our intuitive thinking to address the challenges we are trying to solve. The exercise then shifts to analytical approaches in which trends are prioritized and put into context. We may apply a "strategy canvas" or "four action framework" to pull the stories apart and understand which components are the most important. Many of our results will be organized into the prioritized SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis which, along with our intuitive exercises will inform our process of developing objectives and strategies.

By looking at things from close-up, far away, sideways and upside down; by tasting, smelling and feeling them; by stretching and bending them; we encourage new ways of thinking and innovative approaches. Analytical thinking cannot do this. We then dive into the process of planning for execution to create those future states by breaking the vision into parts that can be measured, assigned and executed. This process cannot be done through intuitive thinking. By blending intuitive and analytical thinking throughout the process we can achieve the combination of innovation and execution that leads to successful organizations.


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