What do you do if your organization lacks a culture of strategic thinking?

Slow down, gather your core team and allow them to think in a longer term horizon. Give them the confidence to ignore the 'urgent' problems for some time to focus on the 'important and not-urgent' ones, that would allow your organization to build competitive edge over the next few years.

To enhance strategic thinking in an organization, it's crucial to cultivate a culture that supports it. This involves aligning the organization's strategic goals with its cultural values, fostering open and effective communication, and engaging employees in the decision-making process. Resistance to change, lack of clarity, and time and resource constraints can hinder the development of a strategic thinking culture. However, by communicating strategy clearly, ensuring leaders embody the desired culture, assessing the current culture, and adapting and iterating the approach, organizations can bridge the gap between strategy and culture.

Reverse engineering is probably the most effective method for a grant administrator to use when the organization does not have a forward looking policy or approach. This means an effective way to jump start strategic planning is for a grant administrator especially with federal and state grant programs to identify grant opportunities which are available on an annual basis to demonstrate to the organization the potential for generating needed resources to address needs and support new initiatives. Strategic planning as well as commensurate forward thinking such as capital improvement programs, economic and housing needs assessment, etc. are vital for local governments and many nonprofits in being prepared to qualify for grant opportunities.

Learn to be an observe and the observation is acquired through day-to-day activities in your life by making a conscious decision to be open and alert.r

Vision, Mission, and Purpose - they are a powerful threesome, providing orientation, identity, and belonging. Sadly, they remain often empty statements, developed from a branding/PR/strategy consultancy. Great sounding posters on company's walls won't cut it. Creating a vision is not an expert-driven top-down communication exercise; it's a collaborative process that unfolds as key element of a pervasive strategic dialogue. And don't forget the most important constituency - your customers, who are always the raison d'etre of any business.

Suppose an organization lacks a culture of strategic thinking. In that case, some of the steps that could inculcate the culture should start by educating employees about the importance of strategic thinking and how it contributed to success and this can be achieve through workshops, trainings sessions and internal communication to raise awareness about strategic thinking and their relevance to individuals’ roles. Open communication where employees can feel comfortable sharing ideas, asking question and challenging the status quo can be a vital tool which will encourage cross-functional collaborations and exchanges of perspective to stimulate strategic discussions.

Most often, skills isn't the only thing that has stopped visionary / strategic thinking. In fact i would argue that it is the least important. The following should be considered: 1) Emotional attachment - why would someone think far if they just don't care? 2) Exposure - human can't imagine or connect the dots for things they have no clue about 3) Involvement - when you stand on the top of the hill, you tend to see different scenery from the bottom. Get employee to be involve in top - level decision making so they are encourage to jump out of their normal mundane routine and try to see things from the top (hence strategic thinking)

"Skill Building" may not be the best word in this context. Sure, there are important cognitive capabilities related to strategic thinking - the ability to analyze, synthesize, connect the dots. And tools that help structure complexity and foster creativity (think design thinking) are useful. These may be "trainable" to a certain extent. But skill building doesn't address the key challenge of strategic thinking - overcoming mindsets and cognitive maps that remain stuck in existing business models and market problem perceptions. They tend to be deeply anchored in emotions such as pride, hubris, fear, or irrational attachment. Not to speak of the informal power dynamics that come with any strategic reorientation, reinvention, or development.

Mentored and trained team members on financial analysis, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills, by engaging the mid-level managers with entry level staff.

Instigating and orchestrating strategic dialogue is one of the most effective ways to enhance a culture strategic thinking - if it's well curated, that is. Strategy is not confined to the strategy department. It is a multifunctional challenge as its implementation requires efforts across the entire company. The most powerful dialogue architectures include also stakeholders from the relevant business ecosystem - first and foremost customers, but also suppliers, partners, regutaltors, even competitors. In a nutshell - meaningful strategic dialogue happens across functional, organizational, and industry boundaries, leveraging the friction that comes with a diversity of perspectives - and creating relationships and trust on the way.

1. Establish a metric system to measure progress towards a strategic culture. 2. Regularly review these indicators to ensure progress. 3. Celebrate successes to maintain motivation and momentum. 4. Address setbacks promptly to prevent derailment. 5. Continuous monitoring ensures the culture evolves and remains effective, such as Google's OKR (Objectives and Key Results) approach.

The AI generated answer suggests a simplistic linear process model: Assessment - Vision - Skill Building - Dialogue - Change - Monitoring Progress. If it only were so simple. Strategy is a messy and in its essence cyclical, systemic learning process that develops in continuous interaction with internal and external stakeholders. Things never turn out as you planned; they are an interplay of deliberate efforts and emerging realities. But then again - AI is based on algorithms, what do you expect?

Successful companies manage to carefully and thoroughly link strategic and operational decisions. Explain your business strategy to all the people in your business. That way people can align their own work with the strategy. Importantly, work that does not align with the strategy can be discarded. Again, it is about all people in your teams.