Have you ever experienced in a meeting where a seasoned leader listened intently and then, with exquisite timing, asked one question that shifted the direction, focus and thinking of the entire team?

That is the magic and power of questions!

To move the needle in your organization in 2016, the first place to start is by asking thought-provoking questions.   The 7 questions below are by no means exhaustive. They serve as a starting point to stimulate your own questions.

These (or comparable) questions can make the difference between a successful 2016 and a disappointing one.

Let’s dig in!

7 Leadership Questions That Will Move The Needle in 2016

QUESTION 1: What is your BHAG?

BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal, a concept introduced by Jim Collins in his book, “Built to Last.” It is one of the characteristics that distinguishes great companies from mediocre ones.

The best definition that I seen is that a BHAG is a statement of strategic intent. A bigger, bolder, more powerful outcome than goals with a target timeframe of 10 – 30 years from now. It’s your ambitious Mount Everest that you want to climb.

Example …

Starbuck’s BHAG is to overtake Coke as the world’s leading brand.

While asking yourself the question … What is our BHAG? … may sound simple, it’s not always easy to answer.

To learn how to develop and test your BHAG, refer to Collin’s book, Built to Last.

QUESTION 2: For what purpose ….?

When I work with leaders, one of the first things I want to know is the underlying motivation for a particular goal, decision, behavior or even emotion.

This question can help uncover those motivations in 3 powerful ways:

• It forces you to chunk up, get out of the weeds and see your situation with a wider lens from a higher elevation.
• It can uncover your unconscious beliefs about cause and effect relationships which may or may not be true.
• It can uncover whether the underlying reasons for your goals/decisions are for healthy or unhealthy reasons.

With each 2016 goal, ask yourself … For what purpose do you want to achieve that goal?  With each response, ask … for what purpose? … again.   It will help shed light on the following.

• Are you choosing right goals for right reasons?
• If they are the right goals, are they for healthy or unhealthy reasons?
• Are there better goals for better reasons?

Oftentimes when companies decide on new goals, strategies or initiatives, they ASSUME they are the right ones. Challenge that with this question.

QUESTION 3: Is your ladder against the right wall?

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”      Stephen Covey

This is one of my favorite questions to ask at least once a year to make sure my goals, decisions and actions are always aligned with my greater purpose.

How do you know if your leadership ladder is against the right or wrong wall?

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Here’s some questions to ask:

• Do you wake up in the morning excited about your 2016 goals?

• Are your leadership and organizational goals primarily focused on moving up the ladder or do they also serve a greater good?

• What comes first when making leadership decisions – profits or purpose?

• What difference do you want to make in your role? Are you realizing that difference?

If you or your company are experiencing success without a sense of significance, it’s time to put your ladder against a different wall.

QUESTION 4: What’s at stake?

Defining your leadership or company goals is the easy part. Sustainable focus and drive to achieve them – no matter the challenges – is the hard part.

Goal success (or failure) depends predominantly on one thing:

Motivation

By continually asking the question — what’s at stake? – you will..

• Refuel your motivation when the going gets tough
• Create urgency for you and your employees
• Uncover what potentially can be at risk if you do achieve your goals

Below are specific variations of this powerful question to get you started.

What’s at stake …

• … to your company if you don’t achieve your goal this year?

• … to other stakeholders if you don’t achieve your goal?
  • Customers?
  • Employees?
  • Investors?
  • Yourself?
  • The world at large 

• … to your company culture/values if you do achieve your goal?
  • Will your culture possibly be compromised?
  • Will your goals compromise other company priorities?

QUESTION 5: Are you solving the right problem?

A problem well defined is half solved.        Charles Kettering

As a leader, you probably spend considerable time solving problems. Perhaps to the point where you get nothing else done.

Because leaders are action-oriented, the tendency is to jump right to a solution, ASSUMING you are solving the right problem. Yet doing so could cost your company significant resources, time and money. Plus you most likely have not solved the real problem.

I learned this invaluable lesson when I was an executive at US Sprint in the early 1980’s. The company was growing 200% for 5 consecutive years. I got a monthly report of all the key problem areas across the company.

One of the key metrics — # of customer complaints – was sharply increasing. The customer service department wanted to hire more customer service reps.

Yet after digging deeper and asking the question – what’s the real problem, it became clear that engineering’s challenge to install enough transmission capacity to meet the dramatic growth in demand was the real problem.

Next time a problem arises within your organization, take 5 minutes and ask …

Am I solving the right problem?

QUESTION 6: Is your timing correct?

Timing is EVERYTHING in business.

Timing can be the difference between success and failure. It can make or break a product launch, change initiative, new technology or even growing your company.

Yet, for even the best leaders, timing is often an afterthought.   I see it happen often.

Be honest with yourself. For this year’s projects, goals, decisions or initiatives, have you asked yourself … Is this the right timing?

• What will happen if you waited 6 months or a year?
• What opportunity will you miss if you don’t implement now?
• Might you be too early or too late?

If you want to learn more about how to discern right business timing, I recommend William Duggan’s book Strategic Intuition and Sun Tzu’s book, The Are of War. Both should be in every executive’s bookcase!

QUESTION 7: What are your blind spots? What are you missing?

Every one of us has blind spots. Our brains filter out over 99% of outside information because of its limited processing capacity. Such brain limitations create distortions in your thinking and perceptions.

At a leadership and company level, blind spots are costly and sometimes catastrophic. Even the best leaders are challenged by unconscious persistent blind spots.

Below are common blind spots from my work with leaders and organizations. Check how many of these blind spots are or could be true for you. Remember: You may have a blind spot about your blind spots :)).

Leadership (self) blind spots: beliefs and behaviors

• Not seeing your impact on others
• Unaware of your negative beliefs and how they are driving your decisions and behaviors
• Not learning from your past failures and recreating those mistakes over and over
• Assuming that your communications to another is interpreted as you intended

Team & organizational blind spots

• Believing your “once healthy” company culture is still healthy when in fact it is eroding as you scale
• Tolerating (and rationalizing away) mediocre or poor performance
• Avoiding conflicts and tough conversations
• Unconscious, unchallenged (and often erroneous) assumptions driving your goals and strategic plan
• Being overly optimistic

Environmental/external blind spots

• Missing emerging market trends and opportunities
• Assuming you know why your customers buy from you when they actually buy for different reasons
• Perceiving smaller competitors as a non-threat
• Not adjusting your company’s strategies to changing conditions in your industry or environment

BONUS QUESTION: What is YOUR overarching question for the new year?

Now it’s your turn.

What one question – if you asked daily — will help YOU move the needle in a key area within yourself and/or your organization?

For example, if you want to increase your personal productivity, perhaps the question is …

What do I need to stop doing?

Or if you want to increase company revenues, you may ask …

What values drive our customers’ buying decisions?

How can we craft our products/services to those values, thus creating repeat customers?

Questions are the ultimate leadership tool for moving the needle, regardless of the goal or challenge. Now it’s your turn to develop your own list of powerful questions.

Drop me an email if you have questions about how to develop powerful questions :)).

For other articles relating to the power of questions :

• The One Question Every Leader Needs to Ask
• 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results

The post 7 Leadership Questions That Will Move Your Needle in 2016 appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Even though I did strategy development for billion dollar corporations in the early days of my business 30 years ago, I had no idea that there were 3 different approaches to strategic planning.  I learned alot from this article.  I know you will too!

Time is Money: The 3 Different Approaches to Strategic Planning

“The marvelous thing about lack of planning is that failure comes as a complete and utter surprise.”
– Peter Green

One of the biggest challenges organizations face is making the commitment to develop a well thought out strategic plan. “Are you kidding me!” they’ll say. “Who has the time do a strategic plan with so much work to do?” Instead they wander into the work place and react to crises. And ironically, most crises are a result of their failure to plan! So why don’t more organizations engage in strategic planning? Lack of time is one reason. Another may be confusion over the strategic planning process itself.

Even if your business commits the time to develop a strategic plan, you may be unaware that there are different approaches to Strategic Planning. Depending on the size of your organization and the desired outcomes for the planning process, there is a strategic planning process that is right for you.

“Strategic planning is the strategic thinking process whose outcome is clarifying the purpose of the business, where the business wants to be in the future and the choices the business will make to get there.”
– Najera Consulting

What exactly is Strategic Planning?

While there are countless definitions as to what strategic planning is, Najera Consulting defines strategic planning as the strategic thinking process whose outcome is clarifying the purpose of the business, where the business wants to be in the future and the choices the business will make to get there.

The following are the 3 most common approaches for Strategic Planning, ranked in order from least to most strategic:

• Goals focused
• Issues focused
• Systems focused

Goals Focused Approach to Strategic Planning

This approach is the most common form of strategic planning. It is also the least strategic of the three common approaches to business planning. This approach calls for a heavy emphasis on establishing clear business goals. Action plans are then developed to achieve these goals.

A Goals Focused Approach is Right for You, if….

• You are confident on how your business creates, delivers and captures value.
• You are confident that you can identify goals into the future.
• Your business has very limited resources in terms of people, time and money to devote to a more comprehensive strategic planning process.
• You have established clear mission, vision and values statements that are understood by your entire business team.
• There are very few, if any, critical issues facing your business.
• The internal and external environment of your business is somewhat stable.
• Decisions are made often in a top-down, hierarchical fashion.
• Your business has successfully implemented a strategic plan within the last two years.

Issues Focused Approach to Strategic Planning

This approach is sometimes referred to as Critical Issues Planning and is somewhat more strategic than the Goals Focused Approach. This approach places a heavy emphasis on a situational analysis of the business.

It then moves on to identifying issues impacting the business. Action plans are then developed to address said issues. The organization’s mission, vision and values might be developed afterwards, however it’s not the main focus of this planning process. Future business goals and strategies may be established, but only after issues are identified and addressed.

A Issues Focused Approach is Right for You, if….

• You are confident on how your business creates, delivers and captures value.
• Your business faces several critical issues that need further clarity.
• Your business has very limited resources in terms of people, time and money to devote to a more comprehensive strategic planning process.
• You expect or foresee major changes in the internal and/or external environment of your business sector over the next year or so.
• Your management team struggles to identify and reach consensus on key issues and clear goals for the future.

Systems Focused Approach to Strategic Planning

This is the most strategic and comprehensive form of Strategic Planning. It is also the approach most used by our clients. This is a non-linear, organic, iterative, intuitive approach to strategic planning that is best suited to entrepreneurial minded organizations.

The value of this approach is that it provides the business a big-picture perspective cause and effect relationship of its business model. In this approach an equal emphasis is placed on the business’s mission, business model, situational analysis, current and potential customer base and the business’s core value proposition. The resulting strategies are viewed as the highest-level organizing principles for the business.

A Systems Focused Approach is Right for You, if….

• You would like clarity on how your business creates, delivers and captures value.
• You would like more clarity on your mission, vision, and values statements before attempting to make major decisions impacting the financial future of your business.
• You have struggle conform to any type of strategic planning process.
• You are unsure of your desired competitive position and/or social impact.
• The external environment of your business is constantly changing.
• Decisions are made often in a bottoms-up, organic fashion.
• You have struggled in the past to adhere to any type of business planning process.
• Your business has never before developed and implemented a complete strategic planning process.

Some of us may think we’re too tight on time and money to start on any course of strategic planning. But according to The Law of Planning by Brain Tracy, every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution. And if you believe in the saying that “time is money,” according to my calculations this is a 1,000 percent Return on Investment!

Who can pass this up?

Written by Gabriel Najera, Founder, Najera Consulting Group

Gabriel Najera is president & founder of the Najera Consulting Group. The Najera Consulting Group assists corporate and nonprofit organizations in developing, clarifying and implementing high objective strategies that will allow them to outperform their competitors. Gabriel is a frequent speaker to organizations. And, is a highly sought after advisor to corporate and nonprofit executives looking to develop a strategic thinking mindset.

The post Are You Aware Of The 3 Approaches to Strategic Planning? appeared first on The Empowered Business.

• Do you know how current trends will change the face of leadership in your company?
• Is your company ready to meet the new leadership challenges in the coming years?
• Are you aware of how leadership is evolving to respond to those trends?

Every leader knows the importance of being strategic.  Being strategic means looking into the future and identifying trends, opportunities and threats.

Below are my 2015 leadership predictions – threats, trends and opportunities – that will change the world of leadership as we know it today.

1.    Complexity is the new normal.

The intensity of change is increasing at an alarming rate. Such changes will pressure leaders to lead agile organizations, while attempting to do more with less in an already over-taxed work environment.

To succeed in this new normal, leaders must become master delegators, change agents and futurists.  They must oversee strategic planning as a dynamic process, not an annual event.  They must become laser-focused on the critical few while filtering out the less important many.

2.   A rising shortage of good leaders and leadership capabilities spells disaster for future growth.

With the continued exit of baby boomers, millennials have become the largest segment of the workforce for the first time.  As a result, millennials are being pushed into leadership roles before they are ready.

Also, many qualified managers are choosing entrepreneurship, rather than continuing to climb the corporate ladder. This trend will exacerbate the shortage of capable leaders.

To deal with this shortage, companies must invest in growing their own leadership talent.  They must develop a continuous pipeline of potential leaders and groom early before undertaking those roles.

3.    The 3 most critical leadership skills to navigate the future will be:

• Advanced “people skills”

Of all the skills a leader develops, the capacity to lead and influence people is ranking higher every year amongst CEOs.  The most important of these leadership skills needed for the future will be:

-   Building a culture of self responsibility and accountability

-   Coaching and developing new leaders

-   Hiring “best fit” talent – in terms of motivations, values and competencies – to drive a high performance culture

• Problem predicting (over problem solving)

Most strategic plans are not really strategic.  Many leaders create annual plans that extrapolate from the past and focus on eliminating current problems (aka “problem solving”).  If such a plan is successful, all that has been achieved is an absence of problems.

On the other hand, a true strategic plan focuses on what you want your company to become in the future, the results you want to create and the unexpected problems you anticipate along the way.  The focus is on problem predicting and the actions necessary to prevent the problems.

• Change leadership (over change management)

Change will only accelerate in the future.  To thrive in such an environment, leaders must know how to initiate and respond to strategic change.

While change management still is important, its main focus is on following plans, creating responsibilities and measuring results. Change management is about things.

Change leadership, however, focuses on leading change – ie., making things happen that would not normally happen.  It’s about inspiring employees to participate and “own” their contribution in future company direction.  Change leadership is about people.

4.      Higher cognitive impairment, burnout and stress amongst leaders is escalating due to information overload.

The rise of mobile communications, social media and web 3.0 have their dark impact on leadership performance, despite the benefits.

• Leaders’ brains are being hijacked due to an addiction to information.

The constant bombardment of information provides leaders with a feeling of new and exciting — triggering the neurotransmitter dopamine and a sense of immediate gratification.

Repeated exposure – in this case, to “information pleasure” – hijacks leaders’ brains to continually seek more information.

The end result is confusion, avoidance patterns in tackling challenging tasks and reactive decision making.

• Leaders are jeopardizing their companies with decision-making fatigue.

Research has shown that, to deal with this constant influx of information, your brain assumes that the latest news is the most important.

Behavioral economist George Lowenstein of Carnegie Mellon University calls this the “urgency effect.” The urgency effect means that your brain tends to overvalue immediacy over quality of information.

The implications of this brain bias are that leaders will feel compelled to make quick (often poor) decisions over right decisions.

• Information overload is inhibiting your leadership creativity.

Leaders’ brains need “space” to synthesize new with existing information and identify new connections and hidden patterns.  With information overload, leaders are less likely to make those crucial creative connections. 

5.    The third evolution of leadership intelligence – what I call Transcendent Leadership — is now emerging.

Leadership styles evolve over time to meet the changing needs and values of business.

Transactional leadership – dominant in the 20^th century –emphasized disciplinary power, the smooth flow of daily operations and rewards/punishments to drive performance.

At the start of the 21^st century, Transformational leadership became the new leadership style — focused on long-term vision, team-building, collaboration and employee engagement.  At the heart of transformational leadership is the development of awareness with such capabilities as Emotional Intelligence and Conscious Capitalism.

What’s the next evolution of leadership?

I call it Transcendent Leadership.  A Transcendent Leader has a level of super-consciousness that transcends the physical world (including time and space) and drives exceptional results through the quantum world — ie., the world of energy, thoughts and spirit.

Photo: Robert Couse-Baker

Transcendent leaders go beyond emotional intelligence and focus on energetic intelligence.  They know how to tune into others’ energies and ignite their deepest motivation and potential.

They have mastery of mind, imagination and energy — pushing the boundaries in what is possible and achieving what is impossible.  They have the ability to “rise” above their thinking mind (aka metacognition) and disconnect from their own perceptual biases and limiting beliefs that hold them back.

6.    Increased time starvation and anxiety will create more crises. 

Many leaders believe that more is better.  That saying yes to everything creates more success.  That going to more meetings feels more productive.  That having a packed calendar is what good leadership is all about.

The truth is … more is less productive.  More creates more crises and escalates stress to levels beyond what leaders know how to control.

Doing more drives an even bigger problem amongst leaders …

Time Starvation. 

Time scarcity amongst leaders is NOT a time management issue.  It’s a mindset issue and a company culture issue.

The drive for more and a leader’s addiction to busyness prevent them from pulling back and reflecting on core issues and strategies for the long term. 

7.   Leadership brain training and coaching will become the new paradigm for developing leaders.

To prepare leaders adequately for the future, companies will need to change how they develop leaders.

Much of today’s leadership development methods focus on building external capabilities and changing behaviors.  While those are needed, both areas are a byproduct of how a leader’s brain is wired.

Leaders’ brains are overtaxed, hit with a level of complexity and information unlike any time before.  Behavior changes nor skills development won’t solve these problems.

The solution requires a new type of executive coach or consultant.   It requires experts in brain training and reprogramming.

Those companies who utilize brain training technologies to develop their leaders will increase performance in days and weeks, rather than months and years from conventional methods.

Summary

Not only will companies need to prepare for a shortage of leaders.  They must also train their leaders with a new generation of leadership skills to succeed in the future.

Companies must also find innovative ways to protect and expand a leader’s most important asset – his/her cognitive brain capacity – in the midst of increased information overload, complexity and time scarcity.

At the same time, experts in brain training and energy leadership are emerging.  These experts can provide leaders with the necessary capacity to think on higher and more complex levels to handle future challenges.

The question is … what are you doing to get ready for these trends?

Remember:  “Fortune favors the prepared.”

_________________________

Denise Corcoran helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive double and triple digit growth … by design. Her company — The Empowered BusinessTM — is one of the few companies providing whole brain, strategic solutions for unleashing leadership and organizational potential that conventional methods can’t achieve. Learn how to master your Inner Game of Leadership, by downloading our free report – Wired to Win Big. Connect with Denise at her Blog, LinkedIn, Twitter or contact her via email.

The post 2015 Leadership Predictions: appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Today’s companies have it all backwards.  Leaders have a thirst and drive for answers to their biggest challenges.

Thousands of leadership books are published yearly to feed that thirst.  Buying those books to find the right answers for your company is where leaders make their biggest mistake.

 

Leadership is NOT about having the right answers.  It’s about asking the right questions.

If you’ve read my article “12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results,” you know why questions are so powerful and how they can change organizational results … overnight.  If you have not,  click here.

The Make-or-Break Question Critical to Your Business Future

There is one question though, above all others, that smart leaders ask … not just once, but everyday.  This one question has the power to:

• Create sustainable company growth and profitability
• Rise above your competition
• Make you an innovative leader in your marketplace
• Accelerate organizational and culture change
• Increase employee engagement and performance

This one question has equal relevance to both your external and internal environments.   What is that one question?

Where can we win?

Why This One Question?

How many times …

• have you spent great effort and resources on goals and strategies that were never worth your time to begin with?
• has your company pursued markets and customers that actually took you further from your goals, not closer?
• has your company spread itself thin with too many organizational changes, initiatives or diverse priorities?

The truth is …

“There are many battles in business not worth winning.   Worst still is to LOSE such a battle you should have never fought to begin with.”     Denise Corcoran

 Know which strategies and plans will lead you to your goals and which will not.  Distinguish those that create gain and those that create loss.  As the saying goes,

“Measure twice, cut once.”

The Secret to Winning in Your Marketplace

To succeed in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, it is critical for leaders to ask daily …

Where can we win?

And equally important …

Where can we not win?

Where you are winning today is not where you can win tomorrow.  To best answer these questions more deeply requires three steps.

Step 1:  Pause and take a REALITY check.  Challenge every assumption about your current goals and plans.

Take a look at your revenue and profit goals and ask yourself:

• Will your current customers (or desired customers) really get you to your goals?
• What makes you think your plan and expected outcomes are reasonable?
• Did you make up those outcomes and hope that you would reach them?

Remember …

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Step 2:  Dig deeper.  The real truth about where you can win is below the surface.

Even if you think your goals and plans are reasonable, dig deeper.  You will find real answers to your revenue or profit challenges below the surface. 

For example, do you tend to target customers based on their ability to pay your price?  While that is a good start, there are deeper questions you need to ask.  Such as …

• Are they willing to pay you your price?
• Are there competitors driving price resistance?  Are those competitors lowering customer demand for your products/services?
• How do you adapt your plans to this new reality?

If you have hit a ceiling in revenues and/or profits, you need to dig deeper to get the truth about your company’s reality.

Step 3:  Utilize the power of peripheral vision to detect early (often subtle) warning signs that your business needs to shift. 

In today’s rapidly changing world, smart leaders have systems to detect early warning signs that the positioning of their business may need to change. Even if realistic today, your strategies and plans may not be valid tomorrow.

What are examples of early warning signs that your company may need to re-position itself?

• Pressure on profit margins
• Decline in customer satisfaction
• Appearance of new competitors
• Loss of market share in key segments
• Surprises by outside high impact events in the last few years

The key to detecting early warning signs that your environment is shifting is to develop your leadership peripheral vision.

In a literal sense, peripheral vision is an expansion of your normal attention to what’s happening at the edges – the periphery – of your field of vision. You are often in peripheral vision, for example, when driving on a highway, assuming you are not engaging in any distractions.  Your vision expands to see cars in all directions in order to respond in a moment’s notice, if needed.

In the business world, leaders are mostly engaged in their foveal vision — critical for focus on goals and critical tasks of the organization.  However, foveal vision also creates serious tunnel vision to big picture strategic issues and the ever-changing environment in which it operates.

Leaders must train their minds to continually monitor the periphery or edges of their environment for subtle and early shifts. Here’s why.

Peripheral vision …

• Helps you detect emerging opportunities in your marketplace before your competitors
• Gives you early signals regarding outside threats to your growth – such as, new alternative substitutes that can satisfy your customers’ needs
• Helps you anticipate and respond to future unmet customer needs not even their radar screen today
• Slows down your negative internal dialogue that drives ineffective leadership decisions and actions 

NOTE:  To learn about how to develop your peripheral vision as a leader, fill out my contact form and I am happy to pass on resources.

Bottomline:  If your company has hit a growth ceiling … has been on a vicious profit rollercoaster ride … or in perpetual crisis mode, then STOP.

Pause and ask yourself the ONE question that determines the extent your company survives vs. thrive in the future.

Where can we win?

And, if you are feeling bold and confident,

Where will we win?

Ready to get off the profitability and/or revenue roller coaster ride?   Click here to sign up for our 90 minute, complimentary Leadership Edge Strategy Session to develop a leadership strategy to achieve your goals and desired breakthroughs.

Other Related Links

12 StrategicThinking Questions That Yield Big Results.  

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think. 

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post The ONE Question Every Leader Needs To Ask appeared first on The Empowered Business.

At the end of every year, I take a personal private retreat to clear my mind, take inventory of the past year and create a new vision for the new year.  Knowing the power of questions, at the start of each retreat, I ask myself …

What are the 10 most important questions to ask myself in this retreat to take my business (and life) to a more meaningful, impactful and prospering level in the new year?

For 3-4 days, I spend time by the ocean simply reflecting, letting go of any goals, plans or expectations.  I simply allow myself to just be.   To be a blank canvass upon which new insights, penetrating questions and inner promptings begin to emerge.

Every year I walk away with powerful questions that, simply by asking them, transform my thinking, direction and excitement for the future.

I share that with you for one reason only.  To embrace and utilize the power of questions within yourself and your organization on a daily basis.

“The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way.”   African Proverb

Why Focus on Questions, NOT Answers? 

Our greatest shifts and changes in business and in life come NOT from answers, rather from powerful provocative questions.  Questions have the power to:

• Transform
• Open up conversations
• Solve problems creatively
• Shake up your thinking
• Build critical thinking
• Shift your focus
• Inspire new direction
• Shatter your assumptions
• Unleash potential
• Keep you aligned with your sense of identity, purpose and vision

… and much more.

In keeping with this month’s theme of building your strategic thinking muscle, below are 12 provocative strategic questions to create a new future for you and your company.

12 Provocative Strategic Thinking Questions You Need to Be Asking

Vision, Goals and Strategies

• As you envision where you want your company to be in 10 years, what BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) do you see your company achieving?
• In order to achieve your BHAGs, what innovative ideas and strategies did you have to come up with?
• What “enemies” (external or internal) will you have to defeat along the way to achieve your BHAGs?

Markets, Competitors and Customers

• Imagine it’s 5 years from now.  What are your competitors envying the most about your company?
• What do your competitors respect the most about your company?
• What do you envision the future needs of our customers to be in 5– 10 years and how do you expect to meet them?
• What is your company the “best of” in your field or industry?
• When it comes to customers, how is your organization shifting from a “how many” to “who is our most profitable customer” focus?
• How are you staying on top of changing global, competitive, market, economic and technology trends to uncover hidden opportunities?

Changing the Inner Game 

• How are you breaking down big change in your organization into pieces too inconsequential to fail?
• How would you change if you HAD TO get 10x better/ bigger in the next 12 months?
• What do you have to do less of, to achieve more in your company?

Bonus Question

“For true success ask yourself these four questions:

Why?

Why not?

Why not me?

Why not now?”

James Allen

By no means are the above questions exhaustive.  In fact, they barely scratch the surface.

What provocative questions can you ask within your organization to build stronger strategic thinking capacity?

Share your own provocative strategic thinking questions and we will add them to this list with your name.

The post 12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results. appeared first on The Empowered Business.

As a leader, how often do you find yourself …

• 

  Thinking Behind Strategic Thinking

  Overwhelmed by an overload of demands, not knowing what to respond to first?

• Continually fighting for certainty, paralyzed by fear of the unknown?
• Blind sighted by unforseen events that jeopardize your company’s stability and bottomline?

I’m guessing what you really want is to stop your perpetual busyness.  You want to focus on the critical few.   You want to navigate your company, amidst constant change, to its ultimate destination.

In my decades of working with leaders, I have found that the above are symptoms that a leader lacks the capacity to think strategically.  Let’s look at how to turn those symptoms around.

The 3 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Strategic Thinking:  What It Is AND Is Not

1. Strategic thinking is an exercise of the brain muscle, not the wrist muscle.

Despite what many leaders believe, strategic thinking is NOT quantitative analysis – eg, generating sales forecasts – nor quantitative goals – eg,  $100 million in revenues.

While numbers are important in planning, true strategic thinking is qualitative.  It is about HOW you think as a leader, and less about the contents of your thinking.

 2. Strategic thinking is NOT the same thing as strategic planning.  In fact, many strategic plans have little strategic thinking behind them.

For most companies, strategic planning focuses on breaking down a goal into action steps and connecting those steps to resources, timelines and budgets.

While strategic planning is an important activity for implementation, a plan, without strategic thinking preceding it, has little chance of success.  While strategic planning defines the steps to move up the ladder, strategic thinking (in the words of Covey) defines whether your ladder is against the right wall.

 3. Strategic thinking is more about the structure of one’s thinking, NOT the content of one’s thinking.

While most strategy development efforts focus on content – or what one thinks, strategic thinking is driven by how one thinks – ie., the thinking behind the thinking.   We call this metacognition.

For example, assessing a competitor’s strengths focuses on content.    While the structure of your thinking may view competition at a higher elevation, such as the changing forces in one’s industry and impact on the competitive landscape.

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think:  The 6 Core Characteristics

Essentially, strategic thinking is a mindset.  It is the art of making the right decisions for attaining future success in a complex, uncertain world.   

Although there are many books about strategic thinking, my focus for this article is on the structure of strategic thinking … the Core 6 characteristics.

To uncover a leader’s strategic thinking capacity, I utilize a tool called the Inventory of Workplace Attitude and Motivations (IWAM) to assess a leader’s strength in the Core 6, as well as dominant mental patterns blocking a leader from thinking strategically.

Below are my Core 6 characteristics of strategic thinking.

Global (or Holistic) Thinking

Global or holistic thinking combines the cognitive abilities of:

• Big picture thinking (ie, seeing the overall landscape from a 10,000 foot level … such as your organization or industry. 
• Systems thinking (ie., ability to see the interrelationships between elements … such as, how decisions made in engineering impact other functions)
• Patterns recognition (ie., seeing cause and effect patterns within your environment, peoples’ behaviors and even within yourself  … such as “when I take 5 minutes to plan daily, I have a more productive, focused day.”)

The purpose of holistic thinking is not to accumulate knowledge, but to create new mental maps that unleash greater thinking possibilities for the future.

Example of Holistic Thinking:  Bill Gates and Paul Allen did not invent anything to start Microsoft. The personal computer revolution was started by putting together existing technologies in a way never done before. They could see from a 10,000 foot elevation how seemingly unrelated technology trends intersected, eventually disrupting the computer industry in a completely new direction.

Future Oriented

Strategic thinking leaders view their company’s past and present through the eyes of the future.  Strategic thinking requires strategic foresight and asking such questions as …

• What new emerging trends will shape our company’s future?
• What new possibilities may exist 10 years from now that don’t exist today?
• What unmet needs will our customers have in the future, not even visible on their radar screen today?

Strategic thinking requires a mindset that anticipates rather than reacts.  A strategic minded leader is seeking out opportunities through a “future” lens rather than merely responding to today’s problems and customer needs.

Example of Future-oriented Thinking:  According to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, management expert, the “principle of anticipation and innovation — driven by the producer, not the customer — is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

Henry Ford, a leader with great strategic foresight, understood that principle.  He said if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would’ve asked for a faster horse.

Options Thinking

Options thinking is nothing new.  Our whole lives consist of endless options –  what will we eat for dinner, where will we invest our money and so on. The same is true for organizations.

To achieve strategic success, leaders must develop their options thinking capabilities on two levels:

1. Defining multiple options for reaching goals and choosing the “best”;
2. Identifying a wide range of possible future states (aka environmental scenarios) to uncover and exploit emerging opportunities.

To understand why, imagine, if you picked a random path up a mountain – rather than finding the easiest among multiple alternatives.  Or that you did not consider various conditions in your climb – like snow, dangerous animals or equipment failure.  What would be your chances of success?

In a similar fashion, many strategic plans fail within organizations due to lack of options thinking.

Example of Options Thinking:  In 2006, Mike Jackson, CEO, AutoNation, challenged industry assumptions by asking “what if buyers replaced cars every 5 years, not 3 years?”  By looking at a low probability, high consequence event, AutoNation experienced profitability and positive cash flow, while many dealers went out of business.  That’s the advantage of options-thinking.

Differences–Oriented

When a leader is a high differences-thinking person, it tells me two things:

1.  His/her brain is wired to sort for differences. These leaders are innovators.  They love to change the rules of the game.  Think Steve Jobs as a “high differences-oriented” leader.
2. They thrive on change.  Not only can these individuals respond easily to change.  They can “see” possible changes in the future that others may dismiss or think impossible.

Such leaders have the ability to see and capitalize on hidden opportunities that others don’t have the thinking capacity to spot.

Example of Differences-Thinking:  Billy Beane, General Manager, Oakland A’s, shattered conventional baseball beliefs that big payrolls translate into big wins. His unconventional use of statistics in identifying undervalued players led the A’s — one of the worst teams in baseball with one of the lowest payrolls — to three American League West division titles.  This is hallmark of a differences-oriented thinker.

Achievement/Success Thinking

An achievement-thinking leader is an individual who is motivated by success and by being the best.  Achievement-thinking leaders choose strategies that exploit an advantage. Their only goal is to win.

To develop this thinking muscle, leaders must address fundamental achievement-oriented questions, such as …

• What defines success?
• What are the factors that drive success?
• How will we measure success?

Example of Achievement-Thinking:  Olympic athletes are the quintessence of achievement-oriented thinkers.  Their whole focus is on winning the gold medal.  For many, even a silver or bronze medal is considered failure.  They seek every possible strategy to get the advantage: the choice of a coach, equipment, mastering the fine points of technique, etc.

Proactive Balanced with Reflection

Most leaders by nature are highly proactive and take little time for reflecting.  Yet, to solve the increasing unfamiliar problems facing businesses today, a leader must learn to balance (proactive) action with reflection for new insights to problems with no precedence.

This balance requires leaders to take regular time for reflection and cultivate a sense of right timing for action guided by one’s own intuition.

True reflection is not about thinking hard, but rather a presence of mind.  A state of mind in which you view a situation from not knowing … a beginner’s mind.  (see Strategic Intuition, William Duggan)

Example of Proactive Balanced With Reflection:  Napolean was a master at strategic insight.  What he lacked in size of army, he made up in precision and reaction rate. Napoleon said it best: “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.”

Building your own strategic thinking muscle

A small amount of consistent time and practice is all it takes to build your own strategic thinking muscle.  For example …

1. Learn chess.  It is one of the best ways to develop the strategic thinking characteristics described above.
2. Subscribe to the Futurist magazine published by the World Future Society.
3. Track the BIG, new things the smartest people & organizations (regardless of industry) are doing.  Then adapt them in your company.

If that seems too much now, just remember …

Do less.  Reflect more.

Problems less.  Possibilities more.

“Play not to lose” less.  “Play to win” more.

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