4 Types of Thinking Leaders Need to Use - and Teach (part 2)

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Welcome to part two of the four types of thinking leaders need to practice and then teach. How and when to use expert, critical, strategic, and systems thinking. It's by Heidi Grant and Sean McCann from February 2025 Digital Harvard Business Review. So in the first cast, we looked at the first two types of thinking, expert thinking and critical thinking. Today, we're going to pick up with strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is about taking the long-term approach.

It's about seeing around corners. It's about high-level perspectives, looking beyond the immediate situations, and really thinking above the limits of our current ways of knowing and doing. The defining characteristic of this type of thinking is the use of imagination, a willingness to ask what could be and what if. Some of the AI tools that could help you here with your exploration, try experimenting with different types of prompts really to gain insight into what's possible.

So for instance, the article recommends doing a SWOT analysis on what you're trying to think about. I know when I used to do a lot of behavioral interviewing, behavioral interviews. Assessment. Sorry, I use a particular type of normative assessment, and I would often ask the client to do a SWOT analysis on their own personality. Now, of course, SWOT is a marketing concept. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

So I'd have them run a SWOT analysis over their own personality. And what that did was open up a lot of different strategic areas to explore with my clients. So I really see the value in doing that. Where can you run a SWOT analysis on your business, on your line of business, on your team, on your staff meetings, you know, things like that? You can be really creative here. Also, if you're looking for current trends along this line of thinking, run it through an AI model.

And here's an interesting one, providing data visualization of the problem as well. That could, again, be a very eye-opening way to look at your current problem. So, when do you use strategic thinking? Well, when you need to make big decisions with long-term consequences that might affect a lot of people, that might, you know, constrain your future, that's a good time. Anytime you're thinking about the future, really is a good time to use strategic thinking.

Also, anticipating how market forces or customer needs are going to change in the future. Good time to employ strategic thinking. Using strategic imagination and asking what if allows you and your organization to move past the status quo and shape your environment instead of being shaped by it. I love that quote. I think that's right on track for strategic thinking. Okay, that's the third type of thinking leaders need to use and to teach.

The last one the article recommends we look at is systems thinking. The ability to connect disparate dots of information. The ability to see the interconnectedness of things. It involves understanding how different parts of a system interact with each other and how changes in one part of the system affect all of the other parts. Love this type of thinking. One way that artificial intelligence can help us here is to identify internal and external influences on our systems.

That, of course, may not be readily apparent. What else? You know, what other internal or external influences are missing from my model that I'm not thinking about? I'm thinking now of the PESTEL analysis. If you've never heard of that, P-E-S-T-E-L. I remember bringing that up and teaching that in a healthcare environment as a consultant many, many years ago. And the senior leaders in the room looked at me like deer in the headlights.

They'd never heard of the PESTEL analysis. So if you've never heard of that, I'm not going to go into the specifics of that acronym, but just look that up. It might provide some useful insight. Also, what patterns are emerging from the system? That can help you also dissect either leveraging strengths of the system or pointing out other types of weaknesses.

So the place that you want to use systems thinking, if you need to really understand a complex situation that has all kinds of interconnected elements, well, that's a perfect place to use systems thinking. Also, identifying patterns and relationships within a system. I'm thinking here of the concept of mind mapping. Tony Buzon was a very famous consultant who really kind of put mind mapping on the map, if you will.

So systems thinking helps us do this. Mind maps are a really, really good tool to help you there. And then this last thing, I really love this concept, is when you want to design for or take into account this concept called emergence. And emergence is where you find qualities possessed by a system that are not possessed by any one part of the system, but are created by the collective operation of its parts. I really love that idea. For instance, like the problem of traffic jams, right?

It's caused, and this wasn't in Henry Ford's thinking, but it's caused by the automotive transportation industry. It's not the fault of the designers of the car. It's not the fault of the drivers of the car necessarily. It emerges as many, many cars are put into the market and many, many drivers are driving them. And so the problem is inherent within the system, not within each of the part. It emerges from the system. So really cool concept.

Well, these invaluable types of thinking are really essential of modern leadership, and each is absolutely something that we can and should be taught in every organization. Understanding what each type of thinking is for, when to use it, potentially when to help, when to let AI help you augment your thinking, provides us as leaders with a common language and a way to choose the right tool at the right time for the right job.

So lastly, it should be noted that every type of thinking is best done in teams, not as individuals. There's no thinking that isn't made more thorough, more accurate, more innovative by the presence of other minds offering different perspectives together, asking even better questions. Well, that's it. That's the four types of thinking that we as leaders should be practicing, should be using, and teaching to our teams and organizations.

And I hope you've enjoyed this. dive into this world of the mind. And until we meet next time in the manager lab, do good work. Music.