Earlier this year I posted this on my own blog. While reading Society 3.0 I noticed strong similarities between the way 'wereldmensen' (or society 3.0 members) and strategists think. I'm wondering what you think.

Most of you have been strategic thinkers, probably without being aware of it. When you were a kid, you had:

• An Imagination: you were making up stories and created fantasy worlds to play in
• A Broad Perspective: you looked at the world from different points of view
• The ability to Juggle: you were able to make sense out of a situation even if information was missing
• The ability to deal with things over which you had No Control: you just didn't worry about everything
• An adamant Desire to Win: you persisted in learning new skills by falling and getting up again

According to Julia Sloan in her book Learning to Think Strategically these are: 'the five attributes identified by seasoned and successful strategists as being critical to learning to think strategically'. Let's look at these five attributes a little bit closer.

Imagination
Imagination is about seeing different possibilities and new patterns. Your thinking is divergent. You explore something by looking at it in different ways, using different lenses. You're tapping into your creativity.

As a kid you were very creative. You invented clever ways to bend the rules, thought big and had dreams. You could be fully immersed in drawing, playing or other creative undertakings.
At the right there's a drawing from my 6-year old son: he was in a flow when drawing it. There's a whole story behind it where he draws upon stuff he's heard from us, looked at in his dinosaur books and Ice Age 3.

Too bad most school systems kill creativity in favor of rational and linear thinking, as presented so nicely by Sir Ken Robinson.

Broad Perspective
A broad perspective allows you to see many things at the same time. You might have been told that there's an objective way of looking at things. But, the way you see things is influenced by your upbringing, experiences and beliefs. So, what you're seeing in a particular situation is likely to be quite different from somebody else's view.

This is something I experienced when working on the renovation of our house. I thought I was smart at executing this work, but my wife often had an even simpler solution to reach the desired end result (she calls this blond thinking).

This is just a simple example from everyday life. But, for every business situation there are also many different ways of looking at it. The strategists that Julia Sloan interviewed for her book all stress that broadening your perspective comes from talking, asking questions and especially listening to all sorts of people.

Juggle
Juggling refers to being able 'to pay attention to many things all at once, specifically being able to deal with incomplete and inconsistent information, inaccurate data, and constantly changing information' (according to Sloan). When you're dealing with vision and strategy making (and even if you're not), you receive a lot of information about economics, technological developments, and political processes. This information is also changing all the time.

You need to be able to make sense about how one thing has an effect on another, and vice versa. You do this by juggling with all the information at once in your mind. One of the strategists that was interviewed said that 'you must keep stepping back until you either see something you recognize, or maybe you will see the whole as a new idea'.

I've learned that the stepping back works best if you do this physically. When you're working on something, you can be caught up in too much action. Detaching yourself from your work by taking a walk, having a good night's sleep does wonders. If you decide to let it be for a while, your subconscious mind takes over. And that's very effective. Our subconscious mind is 200,000 more powerful than our conscious mind, according to scientist Ap Dijksterhuis.

You probably know from experience that the conscious mind can only hold a limited number of items. My aikido sensei was always making fun of us with this. He showed a series of 6 or 8 movements in a row and then watched us trying to copy what he had showed. He was always laughing very hard because we remembered only the first and last thing he showed.

So, let you're subconscious do the juggling, while you're sleeping, doing the dishes or working out.

No Control Over
Another strategist that was interviewed by Sloan said that it's a good thing to always be prepared for the unexpected. He added that you should also pay attention to what you can't control.
Conventional wisdom might say that smart people or large companies are able to control their environment. Nothing less is true. Another executive from the book said it very nicely: 'Control is only in your imagination'.

All the executives from Sloan's study overwhelmingly indicated that you need to pay attention to the things you cannot control in order to create winning strategy. And this is contrary to what is taught in most strategy-planning courses.

Desire to Win
One of the COO's that was interviewed by Sloan said that making good strategy is synonymous to figuring out how to win. Getting into the game with the goal to win is what drives strategic thinking.
Sloan concludes that making winning strategy tied all the other attributes together by becoming the reason for learning.

Even if you're not operating in a competitive environment, the desire to win is required. Without it, you won't be able to execute your idea, ship it, and add value to the lives of your clients.
If I look at the collaborative environment that the web is today, this attribute is even enhanced to 'Desire to Win-Win-Win'.

Return to your childhood
I've described the five attributes critical for learning to think strategically, based on Julia Sloan's practical research. Now, you might want to know how to get these attributes into your work and life again. It's actually quite simple. Return to your childhood:

• Use your imagination, dream and start drawing again (with your kids for example)
• Open up your perspective, suspend judgement and aks questions and listen to all sorts of people
• Be comfortable with a lack of information and play with information
• Don't worry about what's beyond your control, start thinking about what you can do
• Experiment, fall down and get up again.

Let me know what you think. Do you see these attributes for yourself and/or in other people? What are you doing to restore and/or enhance these attributes?