People often make me wonder. The things we do and don’t even realise we are following the group or being part of a herd. One day I was driving north on the freeway when again I was stuck in traffic. Frustrated I began to think: what the hell is wrong here? A few minutes later we began to speed up and slow down. Up and down and up and down. Finally some 45 minutes later when I got to the cause of problem I noticed a man standing behind a car someone had torched days earlier that was off the side of the road and nowhere near the traffic. I learned something from this: people are the same as ants in many ways. We stop. We think in discernible group patterns and we act accordingly. Here are some examples that I have also noticed.

Social Networks

People can whine about Myspace, Facebook or Friendster all they like. You know what, those sites are only popular because people forms groups around them and share common interests. They ‘hive’ around concepts. People who have mastered the art of being creaters of social networks have become the stuff of web legend. Popular language calls them mavens, sneezers, influencers and the like. I prefer the term pioneer because I think there is always that person out of the front of the group who can discern ahead of time what it likely to be popular and yes they usually pay the price for it.

Communication in groups

Ants have a knowing that allows them to build great things as part of a huge chain of communication. How do they do it? I don’t know and if you are reading this I am not sure I care to know. All I know is that I see them build huge nests. That is a team effort therefore they somehow communicate information to each other to make that happen. Consider Digg. A source of joy and frustration for bloggers. Digg is a hive. Sure, it’s moderated and has a hierarchy to it which surprises people. Still, it’s built by group communication, clicking and just enough manipulation to make it work. Ants!

Group perceptions and thoughts

We like similar things. I really like CSI, Torchwood, Doctor Who yet for me to enjoy these fine programs there has to be other people who enjoy them. In fact there has to be enough people to enjoy them and spread them around through group communication. Stephen King said it this way in On Writing… we can communicate using our minds. I can say tree and you have already seen what I am thinking in your mind. That’s telekinesis right there. You are seeing what I am saying when I say tree. It’s probably not the same tree but you get my point. Group perceptions are the same. We believe things in groups and build our identities around it.

In this video we have liberal (Australian Conservatives) and the Labour (the opposite). Notice how the comedy trio make light of the situation by playing on group perceptions. They use various political ideas and the way the recent Australian election was promoted as a way to share with us different ideas. The media do this in many many ways. People respond in a typical either/or logic box. Thus we are forced to take sides with two idiots.

Queens and Kings

In some ant societies there are head honchos which we call Queens. So it is in society we elect officials, make things popular and so on. We give people like Paris Hilton attention. We make Harry Potter a legend, we give precedence and through our group activity support and maintain the status quo. Over and over again. These things are made popular through interacting group perceptions, ideas and notions. Our queens and kinds are those we give ‘royal’ status through our constant conversations.

The chain gang mentality

Ants work in a straight line one after the other. I was watching them climb the wall at my house the other day and I wondered why do they do that. The know to go one after the other and form a line. As I thought about this I thought about work and how we do much the same thing. We work, never really questioning why this is the way things are and become part of a chain in a really long line. Day in and day out… nothing really changes.

Strategic Thinking and Action

Ants are great at thinking bigger picture.   They are fantastic and making small things grow into big things.  So are we.  When we work together that is.   In my family, as I imagine it is in yours, there is a lot of feuding.  Being the ‘peacemaker’ in the family I often find myself in the middle of it.  More times than I can count people make ideas they think are important which are really not.   We hold our ground when we could work together to make peace.  The amount of times I have seen great projects or research destroyed because people could not push aside their egos to work together.  Alas, it’s no wonder the world is in such a mess.

Moving heavy objects

Okay so this is where we part company with ants… we can’t move eight times our own weight.  AND we don’t have eight legs either.

In this observation we must remember that comparisons of us with insects is interesting but ultimately there is one thing that separates us from them.  Our ability to destroy things.  Humans have an uncanny ability to form ideological perceptions that destroy nations, spread evil and hate each other.  Do ants hate?  I have no idea.  I am not an expert in insects.  I can say that I admire their team spirit and willingness to work together to form complex wholes… something I rarely see humans do.

The life you now have is one that you built over a period of time.  It’s true that goal setting, having a good set of values and being compassionate and so on is useful.  We reap what we sow so therefore what you have today is the result of what was sown prior.  A wise man once told me, ‘You want to harvest something?  Plant a bunch of seeds!’  The same goes for personal development.

What we sow is what we grow

The problem with the future is that it doesn’t stop turning into today.  By the time I finish this sentence it will already be in the past.  So what can be do presently to shape our lives for the future?  I believe there are several things:

1. Begin to question the way you frame things

Is there some area of your life that you wish you could change.  Chances are it relates to how you think.  If you are like me you get hurt when abusive vacuum salesmen knock down your door.   How do you react to that?  Initially by punching his lights out!  No, you offer the man a coffee or a glass of water and they pray for God to bless his work.  Why?  You stop the cycle when you learn to frame things from another point of view.  Look at the situation from his perspective.  Why does he get upset when we say we can’t afford it?  What’s he going through?

2. Stretch yourself on a daily basis. 

Recently I was reading through this interesting debate at  John Cricket’s Business Ideas and Opportunities website and it struck me how much of a stretch doing more study is for some people.   It is truly hard for some and a breeze for others.  One old guy called Joe that I used to teach really struggled with the way academics think and act.  Especially when it came to demonstrating his knowledge.  He often used to tell me what his experience was and never relate it to theory.  He didn’t seem able to do it.  But, he really stretched himself and went there without sacrificing his pragmatic edge.   You want something from your future, why not begin to stretch out and do something that challenges you on a daily basis.  I have found blogging to challenge me.  It has really given me something to think about and made me work on how to explain academic ideas in a way that normal non-eggheads can understand them.  That’s been a stretch but given that I like blogging… it’s been well worth it.  As you stretch yourself on a daily basis you begin to expand your own capabilities inch by inch.  You are sowing towards a great harvest in the future.

3. Challenge old mindsets

When I started blogging I hit a wall.  Literally I was like , ‘wow how does this work… I am not sure I can actually make this work’.  Now I am no Problogger or anything like that so I had to learn it all from scratch.  I learned what people think and (as imagine we all are) began coming to terms with how google finds me.  I had no idea that people would search they way they do.   Why wouldn’t you want to look for ‘epistemology’ instead of ‘how do I know things?’  I had to shift my thinking to suit the blogging world if I had any hope of finding an audience.

4. Set big goals with small targets

This was a huge revelation to me this year.  Say you are like me… you have a BIG goal of owning a house.  Well that’s great.   So how are you going to get there?  Fishing?  What I learned this year was this: set a big goal and then visualise and speak out small targets.  It has worked wonders in my personal life and professional life as well.  You know a mountain can be moved one piece at a time?  Try it, it works very well.

As you begin to look towards the future in your life, you will begin to see that the things you have now are the sum total of what you did in the past.  In order to have a great life you have to set meaningful goals of course but more than that you have to do things regularly to cultivate those seeds of greatness.  You have to build it, care for it, set small progressive targets on the way to the top.   Sure, some people are born into wealth or just get lucky (like Justin Timberlake) but my guess is that to maintain there is a lot going on in the background that would astonish you.   I am not really talking about those people though am I?  I am talking about people like me who aren’t mega-wealthy.   As they say in Pirate movies… steady as she goes Captain… steady as she goes.

One of the things I have learned from being an academic is the value of thinking strategically. Having spent time on at least two executive boards I can tell you that we really do not understand what strategic thinking is all about. In this post today I am going to briefly introduce the topic of strategic thinking then explain how you can begin to make use of this powerful method of thought.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is all about seeing the big picture, knowing what it means and being able to act on it. To think strategically means you are able to know how the parts related to form a whole. A Greek word used by Arthur Koestler and Peter Checkland is the term ‘holon‘. A holon is a ‘whole part’ a word we really don’t have an equivalent meaning for it our language. It means that each part is a whole that consists in itself and is simultaneously a part of another whole. Put simply: strategic thinking begins with seeing the world as made up of wholes that interact to form other wholes and so on. When we break thinks down into parts we slip into analysis of a singular whole without paying attention to context or external substance.

This means as we learn to appreciate wholes, things will emerge forming a discernible pattern in our thinking. Ever been watching a movie and suddenly realised how the smaller wholes fit into the bigger wholes towards the end of the movie? If you have been paying attention you would have noticed how the smaller details form a pattern, which in turn forms deeper patterns and so on. In systems thinking they call this emergence. The emergent hierarchical order that forms from other smaller emergent hierarchies. To think this way means we recognise patterns and wholes in our lives as being connected to a deeper or ‘higher’ order of structures and wholes.

Being Strategic versus Being Analytical

When we are analytical we break down wholes into smaller parts to work out cause and effect. Put simply, when we analyse a problem we are attempting to understand the causal structures that it consists of in order to change it. Imagine your watch just broke. The system no longer works. What’s the first thing you do when attempting to the fix the watch? You break down the set of steps required to repair it. You open the watch, check the battery and so on. You begin to diagnose the problem, design solutions and implement them. You are into ‘analysis’ mode now and are no longer thinking strategically. You have gone from the strategic level, to the analytical level. Now the watch is working again! You have fixed it! You put all the parts back together again and now you are thinking strategically again. You are seeing the connections between the bits and how they all work (or don’t) together.

When we are being strategic we are interested in how wholes interact versus how parts interact. A strategic thinker is not interested in details until they have to be. A details person is forever caught up in analysis of the present problem is unable to relate things back to the whole. Someone who thinks ‘bigger picture’ is able to switch between details (if needed) to strategy and so forth. So how do I think strategically?

Rumours at work: an example of strategic thinking

I had a visitor to my office the other day telling me about the developments in the Australian academic community. Presently we are going through the RQF (Research Quality Framework) and universities are busy organising researchers into smaller cubes so they can ‘measure’ quality. One person told me that they don’t make the list so they will loose their job. An another person told me the exact same thing a few days earlier. By themselves, these rumours are merely speculation, hearsay and second guesses. But, if enough people say them we have a work issue. The fear of not being adequate under the new conditions the RQF seeks to put on us. This level of fear is fast becoming an academic meme! If I went through the university and asked people I worked with: are you scared of the RQF? A majority would express some concern. On an individual level we have personal fear. On a strategic level we have ‘fear by numbers’. It becomes a trend and before you know it’s a strategic problem.

How do I think strategically

Thinking strategically begins with moving from analysis to the big picture. How do you do this? There are some helpful ways in which you can do this as I have previously discussed. The best way for me to explain it is for you to practice it. Take the issue of climate change for example.  How can we look at that strategically?  First, we top ‘localising’ our thoughts and begin to look for the big connections.  So, if we are talking climate change that means looking at how something generates climate change.  Second, we look for ‘wholes’ (not scapegoats) that could be considered to be things that help generate climate change.   These wholes are presently believed to be: pollution, green house gases, the atmosphere and so on.  Now that we have these things we can begin to look and how they relate to the bigger issue we have identified and see how pollution creates climate change and so on.   Now, I know someone reading this has just said,’Yeah but wait a minute what about those scientists that don’t think climate change is caused by pollution.’  Well, you have realised the most important thing about strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking is perspective shifting

Most people, like Peter Senge, opt for a view of the whole as being taken for granted.  I don’t.  I think the bigger picture of anything is tied to cultural relevance, popular media and so on.  Take the publishing industry for example.  What a rort that is!  A few people get paid millions of dollars whilst the rest of us languish away in obscurity!  Is that fair?  No, it’s not. Is there another perspective we could implement that could make it fairer? Of course.  Why don’t we implement it?  Because we are a lazy pack of gits that’s why!  There is no greater power than social mobilisation.  None.  That said, that’s my perspective… I doubt Stephen King shares the same view.   In strategic thinking you need to realise that each strategic solution is tied to a viewpoint which in turn emulates strategic realities.  In other words, my solution of climate change has two alternatives it’s greenhouse gases versus it’s something else.  Both are views based on opinions, conjecture and research.

I believe this is where most people miss it about strategic thinking.  It is in reality learning to see different bigger picture perspectives, how they do such perspectives effect me and how can I understand them better.  Climate change could be caused by greenhouse emissions.  Are there any other strategic points of view that we can use to understand it as a contrast or a complement to our existing view.  If we can why don’t we make use of them.  Sense making means we put what we think over the world in order to understand it.  Climate change is an observable event.  We can see it.  However, what is really making it happen could be more than one thing.  If we accept one perspective totally we may neglect others that are contradictory and thereby exclude possible answers to our problem.  We have perspective blindness if we don’t take into consideration more than one possible version of events.

An example of strategic thinking and perspectives

A good example of perspective shifting and strategic thinking is the current Australian election campaign war on workchoices.  If you aren’t from this country workchoices is the culmination of the deunionisation of the government towards individual contract arrangements supervisied by a federal commission.  In the old days you would have a dispute go the steward and fight and that would be that.  These days the ever growing trend is towards lawyers and an independent commission.  The Coalition (Liberal/National) government is telling us we need to even further away from unions where as the Labor party is saying that people don’t want workchoices they want more protection (though they are not really forthcoming on what they plan to do instead of unions).

Now the advertising campaigns have been horrible this campaign.  So many that are really petty squabbling.  The Coalition are targeting the Labor party saying that most of them are ex-lawyers or union officials which in turn implies a bias towards returning to the unions.  The Labor party is arguing that workchoices is terrible and the government promised not to do it then did.  Both of these views are based on seperate versions of what they take reality to be.  Both are informing us that the world is this way yet each point of view comes from a personal perspective or bias.  Who are we to believe?  One side shows us the damages unions did to the ‘economy’ the other shows us the damages workchoices has done to Australian worker.  Two entirely different strategic realities.  Now, enter the greens.

The greens have attacked both sides of the government and launched a campaign saying that both of them have lost touch with the worker. Their perspective is we will take action rather than sit around and point the finger.  Then of course, there’s Family First, the Christian Democrats, The Democrats, The independents and so on. These are all different views as to the cause and solutions of problems.  The most important point about strategic thinking is that you must be able to switch between different perceptions of reality and use different thinking modes at all times.

How can I apply this to my life

Remember, the goal is not to be a cynic but to be someone who looks at the bigger picture views and learns to gain insights from all of them.  If you accept one bigger picture view it will obscure you from seeing others that may help you work things out.  You begin to apply this to a problem when you stop taking the local view and begin taking a bigger picture understanding of how things work.  So if you have an issue try to ask this question: how can I understand the strategic factors at work here?  What am I dealing with that I can change and can’t change?  If I can change it what can I do about it?  If I can’t, then how can I make things so this problem won’t effect me?  And so on.  You begin to apply strategic thinking as you come to understand your individual concerns as part of a bigger picture.   At work you are constantly the victim of things your boss is doing.  How does that strategic impetus effect you?  Think about it and you will begin to see things from the strategic view.

The one thing I hope you take from this post today is an understanding of how things relate together and what that actually means for you.  How does your life relate to the those around you?  Think about that over the next week.  Why not begin looking at the strategic direction your life is taking.  What can you change on the higher strategic plain that will have a significant impact in years to come?  Your attitude perhaps?  Try this, I have found it helped me tremendously over the last few years.