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).
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.
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:
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.”
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:
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.
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:
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.
