Multiply Your Value: Build Your Strategic Thinking and Innovation Skills

Jon Lokhorst, CPA, CSP, PCC Leadership Coach, Your Best Leadership LLC
Enhancing Your Ability to Lead

Strategic thinking and innovation skills continue to gain ground as essential capabilities for leaders across levels. In Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Leadership Monitor H2 2025 survey, strategic thinking was the top critical skill for leaders, selected by 58% of the 2,500 global business leaders surveyed. Other highly ranked skills included decision making (33%); change management (32%); and innovation, creativity, and resilience (28%).

Technical skills remain table stakes, but your long-term value as a business leader comes from how well you monitor marketplace trends, anticipate change, clarify the real problems to be solved for customers, and design better solutions (i.e., being a strategic, innovative leader).

WHAT IS STRATEGIC THINKING?

Strategic thinking is one of those “squishy” leadership terms often thrown around but not well understood. Here are a few definitions that offer some insight.

In her book, “Strategic Thinking and the New Science: Planning in the Midst of Chaos, Complexity, and Change,” author T. Irene Sanders writes, “Strategic thinking has two major components: insight about the present and foresight about the future.”

Aaron K. Olson and B. Keith Simerson, co-authors of “Leading With Strategic Thinking: Four Ways Effective Leaders Gain Insight, Drive Change, and Get Results,” state, “Strategic thinking is like constructing a mental map that connects the current ‘here and now’ to something, somewhere, or sometime in the future.”

My working definition focuses on the endgame and beneficiaries of these activities: Strategic thinking is the process of exploring new and improved approaches to meet customer needs. By “customer,” I mean internal as well as external customers, and other commonly used stakeholder terms like client, member, student, constituent, etc. Together, these definitions help connect today’s reality to tomorrow’s choices with the customer in mind.

FOCUSING ON THE FUTURE AND THE CUSTOMER

Future-oriented leaders don’t predict the future, they anticipate and prepare for it. Strategic thinking starts with scanning the horizon for signals that could reshape your work and your customers’ businesses, including:

• Globalization and geopolitical concerns.
• Technological advances and disruptions, including artificial intelligence (AI).
• Economic movement and volatility.
• Demographic shifts and generational differences.
• Workplace and workforce changes.
• Regulatory changes.

To strengthen this capability, acclaimed futurist and strategic consultant Scott Steinberg suggests learning to “think like a futurist.” To become a more future-oriented leader, actively contemplate future events and trends and determine how they’ll impact your business and customers. You should also create action plans for varying scenarios to address challenges you may face before they arrive.

Beyond being future oriented, strategic leaders are also customer oriented. By observing behavior in your target market, you’re better positioned to respond to changing customer needs and preferences. Strategic thinking opens the door to innovation as you discover ways to serve both existing and new customers. The best innovative thinkers open new frontiers; consider the late Apple founder Steve Jobs and the iPhone as a prime example.

One of the best lenses for customer-focused innovation is the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) theory created by the late Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen. In his book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Christensen explained his theory like this: “When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done. If it does the job well … we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.”

A more layperson-friendly approach to the JTBD theory is to ask, “What is the problem to be solved?” With that question front of mind, keep your eyes continually open for new and improved approaches to meet customer needs.

As an example, one of my high school classmates came up with the idea for MinuteClinic after spending an excruciating three hours in an urgent care waiting room for a simple antibiotic prescription for his young son’s ear infection. After later selling MinuteClinic to CVS, he described the experience as a simple, novel solution to a common problem: “We saw a need and wanted to meet that need. We wanted easier access for items that parents need to survive.”

DEVELOPING YOUR STRATEGIC THINKING AND INNOVATION SKILLS

Leaders with strategic planning experience are familiar with the SWOT analysis—the assessment of an organization’s “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” Strategy professor and consultant Stanley Abraham suggests building on that foundation as a step toward developing these skills.

Abraham offers six questions to go beyond the SWOT analysis and cultivate deeper strategic thinking:

1. What other type of customer could benefit from our product (or service), even if used in a different way?
2. What other products (or services) could we produce for the same customer?
3. What other products (or services) could we produce—for any customers—that use the skills, techniques, technologies, and know-how that we have?
4. Is there a way of reinventing our business model that would give us a competitive edge?
5. What unmet needs do people or companies have that we could meet, even if it means acquiring the necessary know-how and expertise?
6. What are the highest growth industries now and in the foreseeable future?

AI can add real value here to help you brainstorm responses to these questions. For example, you can ask ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to generate plausible new customer segments, adjacent service ideas, or potential business model shifts. Then use your market knowledge to refine, validate, and prioritize the best options. As always, protect confidential information and verify AI’s outputs before acting on them.

Regularly asking these questions and others will stretch your thinking to generate new approaches to meet customer needs and grow your organization in the process.

BUILDING STRATEGIC THINKING AND INNOVATION INTO YOUR ROUTINES

The typical pattern in this deadline-driven profession is to run from one thing to the next without pausing to think about the future viability of the business itself. It’s easy to work in the business and never work on it—or to become reactive, rather than proactive.

Here are a few tips to build strategic thinking and innovation into your routines:

• Set aside time: LinkedIn Executive Chairman Jeff Weiner calls this “the importance of scheduling nothing.” While leading LinkedIn through a season of rapid growth, Weiner was known to block out 90 to 120 minutes each day for high-level activities, such as strategic thinking and innovation. Schedule a recurring appointment with yourself for these activities every week, if not daily. Guard that time as the most important meeting of your week or day.
• Find a place: Get away from your office and the day-to-day operational duties that reside there. My best strategic and innovative thinking happens in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and libraries. The white noise and a great cup of coffee add to the pleasure of knowing I’m doing what’s most important for my business.
• Get offline: You may need to be online for reading and research, including your AI use, but spend time offline to do your best, undistracted thinking. A pen and notebook are often the only tools I need.
• Engage your team: Assign each team member one of Abraham’s six questions. Gather periodically as a team to discuss what you’re thinking and explore new opportunities together.

By embracing these habits, you’ll not only sharpen your strategic and innovative mindset, you’ll multiply your value as a leader— furthering your ability to anticipate change, seize new opportunities, and stay ahead in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.