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Look for strategic problem solvers
In a world that’s increasingly uncertain and turbulent, we all put a premium on strategic problem solving skills. Often our highest potential people are the ones who can diagnose a problem that nobody else has seen and then figure out how to tackle it. But how do you identify the people with those skills? Not always an easy thing to do.
One of my favorite ways to solve that problem is to look at the ability to toggle back and forth between the abstract and the concrete. My colleague Drew Carton’s done some research showing that people rise up organizations based on their abstract thinking skills. The people who are able to not get stuck in the weeds of a problem, but actually zoom out are often the ones that we trust to make big decisions and to formulate vision and strategy.
The problem is that once you become a leader, you also need to figure out how to motivate and communicate vision and strategy and that relies heavily on concrete thinking skills. So what I want to know is does somebody simultaneously have the ability to zoom out and zoom in? Can they look at a problem and say, this is actually similar to one that happened in a different industry, and at the same time, can they then tell a vivid story about how they’re going to solve that problem that other people get fired up around? And I think we encounter a lot of people who are either good at abstract or concrete thinking. The combination of the two often makes people excellent at strategic problem solving.
Coach them to toggle their thinking
There are a lot of people with strong leadership potential who excel at abstract thinking, but they really struggle when it comes to making their ideas concrete. And Drew Carton and his colleagues have actually tested a way to overcome this problem. They ask you to engage in mental time travel. The idea here is to imagine yourself 5 or 10 years in the future. Your vision has been realized. Your strategy has succeeded. Paint a picture for me. What looks different? What do you see? How does the organization look different? How has the industry changed? How has this market been disrupted? And the more you can paint that picture, the easier it is then for you to take your big ideas and turn them into something that’s actually palatable. I think that’s an exercise we could all do in our organizations.
You may also have some people who tend to be much more concrete, and you need to coach them to be more abstract in their thinking. One of the most effective ways to do that is to take the old idea of a post-mortem – where we make a bad decision or we roll out a strategy that fails and then we debrief it – and to follow Gary Klein’s lead, where he’s shown that it’s actually more effective to run a pre-mortem.
You get people together and you say this decision we’re about to make or this strategy we’re about to execute, let’s fast forward into the future and imagine that it’s just failed. What are the most likely causes of that failure? When you run that pre-mortem, people end up thinking more broadly and deeply about the possibilities on the table. They end up considering threats around the corner, opportunities that they might have missed, and they’re much more likely to abstract themselves away from their concrete definition of the exact situation they’re in and say what are other situations maybe that look similar to this? What are other organizations or who are other leaders that have confronted similar problems? And then they’re in a better position to prevent their mistakes as opposed to making them and then trying to fix them on the backend.