At the recent Build­ing Cham­pi­ons Expe­ri­ence in Sun­river Ore­gon, I facil­i­tated a break­out ses­sion on the sub­ject of Strate­gic Think­ing. I had sev­eral goals for the ses­sion: to improve our skills at assess­ing where we are with our strat­egy, to become more com­fort­able with cre­at­ing a strat­egy that can make a real dif­fer­ence, and to deter­mine where we need to dig deeper into our strat­egy and fine-tune our approach to strate­gic thinking.

To make sure every­one was on the same page, we began by defin­ing the terms “Strat­egy” and “Strate­gic Thinking.”

Strat­egy is a spe­cific game plan that gets you from one place to another and is con­sis­tent with your vision. It iden­ti­fies spe­cific ways to use your strengths and apply them to oppor­tu­ni­ties in the marketplace.

Strate­gic Think­ing, how­ever, can be defined as a dis­ci­plined thought process that assesses the envi­ron­ment and your strengths and weak­nesses, and then devel­ops spe­cific cat­e­gories of actions to accom­plish your goals in an inten­tional and pur­pose­ful way, con­sis­tent with your vision.

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