ABSTRACT
A fewyears ago aUK initiative, Professional Skills forGovernment (PSG),made strategic thinking a core skill thatwas important for the senior civil service.What ismeant by ‘strategic thinking’?One definition is that it is thinking ahead. This is a surprisingly rare activity in many public and private organizations with very many leaders focusing on the here and now and on short-term matters. In contrast, strategic thinking pays a lot of attention to the future and thinking about long-term developments. This definition of strategic thinking is often implicit in the comments of politicians and civil servants. Arguably, it is a definition that has becomemore important over the last 20 years. There are also other definitions of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking may be defined as thinking clearly about goals, situations, alternative options, resources, costs,
benefits and the feasibility of the actions under consideration. In effect, this can be seen as a specific form of thinking ahead, one in which goals figure very prominently. If strategic thinking is thorough when looking at alternative options and feasibility, time and resources are not wasted on actions that make little difference; in this sense, strategic thinking can also be defined as thinking which finds good ‘leverage points’ for bringing about change. Strategic thinking may also be defined as thinking which pays attention to strategic issues, which are issues vital to the overall success or even survival of the public services organization. This type of strategic thinkingmeans, first, posing questions about fundamental issues in the right way to facilitate the search for solutions and, second, thinking ‘out of the box’ to create new and novel solutions. Both of these steps in thinking are essential for strategic issue management (which we discuss in the next chapter). This view of strategic thinking, when the importance of clarifying the issues is stressed, may lead on to a concern to understand the interrelations between strategic issues. Strategic issue management is also endorsed by people who prize creativity in strategic thinking and the pursuit of innovation rather than simple efficiency. The elaboration of what strategic thinking means in relation to a senior
civil servant or top public manager is not just going into more detail about the thinking involved; the thinkinghas tobe embedded inbehaviour. So civil servants and public managers are encouraged to become more concerned with advising the politicians on strategic choices, addressing trade-offs and tensions, and communicating on strategy. They are encouraged to becomemore involved in longterm direction, working on strategic agendas across boundaries and solving strategic issues or suggesting possible solutions. So, they are seen as having a role in increasing the responsiveness of the government, anticipating issues, risk management and problem solving. (We return to this point later in the chapter.) In this chapter we start off with a simple view of strategic thinking and then
add some layers of complexity.We begin, in fact, with a linearmodel of strategic thinking. We then add some complexity by looking at techniques that may be used to inform strategic thinking. Finally, we acknowledgemore complexity for other reasons, such as the way the real world of pluralism can muddy the clarity of the simple linear process, and as a result of the thinking being based within organizations that have levels of authority within them.
