Strategic Mastery Unveiled with Michael Watkins S2 I Ep 11

In this final episode of Season 2, we continue our conversation with Michael Watkins. Michael Watkins is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School and Co-founder of Genesis Advisors. He is a globally recognised leadership transitions expert and author of the best-selling book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. 

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the world of strategic thinking with Michael Watkins, author of the groundbreaking new book, "The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking."

In this enlightening conversation, Michael shares the core principles and transformative insights from his latest masterpiece. We explore how "The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking" goes beyond traditional approaches, providing a strategic blueprint for leaders looking to navigate complex challenges, anticipate change, and drive long-term success.

Michael shares real-world examples and case studies illustrating how leaders can implement these disciplines in their organizations, providing listeners with actionable insights to elevate their own strategic thinking.

Building on his acclaimed work in "The First 90 Days," Michael discusses the intersection of leadership transitions and strategic thinking, emphasizing the importance of a holistic approach to leadership development.

As we wrap up the season, Michael leaves us with inspiring thoughts on the future of leadership and the role of strategic thinking in navigating uncertainty. Prepare to be motivated and equipped with the knowledge to lead strategically in any professional setting.

Check out Michael’s works: 

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions

Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction: The Essential Companion to "The First 90 Days"

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Vanessa I: Welcome everyone to the next episode of the Career Transition Podcast, the podcast where we explore what it takes to successfully navigate through career transition, no matter which stage of the career you're at. We are your hosts, Vanessa Teo and Vanessa Iloste. 

[00:00:22] Vanessa T: We hope you enjoyed the first part of our conversation with Michael Watkins.

[00:00:26] In this final part of our conversation, we were very excited to speak about his newly launched book, The Six disciplines of strategic thinking. 

[00:00:35] Vanessa I: But what is strategic thinking exactly? Are we born with it or can we nurture it? As a distinct and important capability in leaders, strategic thinking is often not widely understood.

[00:00:48] Vanessa T: What I really loved in this episode finale is how Michael helps us to debunk this mystery by exploring the six specific mental disciplines that together constitute strategic thinking. 

[00:01:00] Vanessa I: We hope you enjoyed this final episode of the season two. Thank you all for listening and we will see you very soon.

[00:01:16] We are optimistic that you have launched a new book. And for someone like me who has been using your book, the one that I consider as your first book, as a reference almost every month, I'm so excited to hear about the fact that there is maybe another second book I can read every month. So I wanted to hear, I wanted to hear a little bit more about this to congratulate you first.

[00:01:37] Because I'm sure it's many years of work and research and knowing how rigorous you are with your frameworks and how deep you go into reflection. I'm sure there are many, many years of reflection on it, but please tell us more about your new book, Michael.

[00:01:52] Michael W: Thank you. It was officially published in the US yesterday, so that's pretty exciting.

[00:01:57] And actually if it gets tomorrow, yeah, in the rest of the world, it's going to get published. It's called The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking. Its impetus was really working with senior leaders and watching them deal with the challenges we're facing, right, of the turbulence, uh, The dynamics of what's happening, right?

[00:02:16] The difficulty planning out very far today, given all the uncertainties and ambiguities of what's going on. And also seeing that some leaders were just really so amazing at their ability to do that and others not terrible, but there was a big difference. We could see a big difference between people that were really outstanding at doing this and folks that were not quite so outstanding.

[00:02:37] And so that just, that sort of thing gets my interest. I sort of love to focus on challenges that are sort of eternal leadership challenges like, there's been leadership transitions, probably from the beginning of humanity. People have needed to think strategically and shape the future of their organizations forever.

[00:02:54] I done those sorts of things rather than the current trend. I find very, very interesting. I did a lot of study of negotiation, but people have studied, people have negotiated from the beginning of time and will negotiate till the end of time. So there's certain things about leadership that I think have an internal quality to them and I think strategic thinking is one.

[00:03:12] So that was one piece of it. The other piece was just, there's so much out there about strategy, but surprisingly not all that much about the thinking part. So there's tons of wonderful frameworks for strategy. We can point to Michael Porters five forces as a seminal framework for strategy. Right. We can point to blue ocean strategy.

[00:03:31] We can point to lots of strategic diamond, right? There's really good strategic analysis frameworks. There's really good strategic planning frameworks. But strategic thinking is something else it's thinking and you've got to kind of get inside people's heads and understand what is it that lets them do this.

[00:03:47] And I think also just, we need a good definition of strategic thinking because without a good definition, we can't develop it. And when I started doing interviews, I was talking to them. For example, HR folks like you who develop leaders. And the first question I would ask you is what is strategic thinking?

[00:04:03] And often the answer was, I know it when I see it. I know it when I see it in a leader, this leader is a strategic thinker. Well, that's great. She can recognize strategic thinkers, but it doesn't help very much around the assessment and development of those people. And so there was something more that needed in terms of defining what it is and then trying to unpack it.

[00:04:22] And that's part of what I just, I really love to do. Right. In the end, I organized it around this idea of recognizing, prioritizing, and mobilizing your organization to deal with emerging challenges and opportunities. It's not an accident that the, the acronym for that is RPM. It's not an accident that it's a cycle that you got to go around it as quickly as possible.

[00:04:44] So that recognize, prioritize, mobilize was the foundation of the way I think about what strategic thinking needs to do. And then from there, well, what are the capabilities that let leaders recognize, prioritize, mobilize? And the first half of the book is really about what helps, what lets leaders recognize and prioritize pattern recognition.

[00:05:03] How do you see what's important in a noisy, complicated, uncertain environment? Electric engineers would talk about signal versus noise. How do you figure out what's the signal in a noisy environment? Systems thinking, again, this comes naturally from a background in engineering and, and so on, but understanding that you need models in your head that look at the world as systems and understand the key elements of those systems.

[00:05:24] The relationships between them recognize that if you kind of push over here, something's going to happen over there, right? Or if you keep pushing over here too much, you're going to set up a negative feedback loop over there or a tipping point. So ideas of systems thinking are really important and valuable.

[00:05:41] And then there was something I called mental agility, and I actually packaged a couple of things together in that chapter, right? One is To do what one CEO I work with calls cloud to ground thinking, being able to go from the big picture of the detail and the other big piece is sort of the chess master ability to look forward a couple of moves and figure out what your best next move is given the state of the board.

[00:06:02] And those combinations of three things, right? Pattern recognition systems, thinking, mental agility. That's the essence of what it takes to recognize and prioritize. And then I incorporated some stuff into strategic thinking that I don't think people have before and may seem a little strange, but I think I can explain why I did it right.

[00:06:20] Because that back end of the book is all about how do you mobilize your organization to rapidly and agilely deal with these things. And I see that as a core part of strategic thinking. It's great to come up with unrecognized and prioritized things, but you can't mobilize your organization to do something about it.

[00:06:35] Eh, not, not all that helpful, right? So structured problem solving, how do you take a team, a leadership team through a rigorous process of framing and solving complicated problems to move people forward is one chapter of visioning. And visioning in this case means creating, inspiring, ambitious, but realistic views of where you wanna go.

[00:06:56] And then working backwards from there to, okay, what do we need to do to put ourselves on the trajectory to get there? And it's also, there's a, a term I coined in that chapter, powerful simplification. How do you communicate with people about the vision and the plan in a way that's powerful and simple?

[00:07:12] And then finally, the sixth chapter of the sixth discipline is probably the one that's going to seem the strangest of all, but it's political savvy. How do you navigate complex political environments, build alliances and do it in a strategic, systematic way. And there I drew my PhD was a decision theory, negotiation theory, game theory.

[00:07:31] And so I drew a fair amount on thinking from those disciplines, right, in that particular chapter. I know I just talked a long time about it, but that's the essence of the book. And I am proud of the book. I think it does make a contribution. It does what you said, Vanessa, which is it dives fairly deeply into these things and provides some useful frameworks for operating.

[00:07:50] Vanessa I: That's fascinating, Michael, I think you have created another masterpiece, so thank you in advance for this contribution, I'm sure that it's going to be fantastic.

[00:08:01] Michael W: So this is my 15th book, and my joke about this is I wrote one book that sold 2 million copies and 14 books that sold like 50 copies each.

[00:08:09] Hopefully, I've got a second get care Vanessa, right? I'm hopeful about the book. 

[00:08:13] Vanessa I: You'll have two fans right here. Yes, yeah, we will do everything we can to make the second, this latest one, the 16th one, the second masterpiece. 

[00:08:21] Michael W: Thank you. If there's ever been a time when we need strategic thinking more than today, not clear when that was exactly, right, given the challenges we face.

[00:08:30] What I say as strategic thinking today is essential, but it's not sufficient, right? You also need to create an agile organization. You need to be personally resilient. 

[00:08:39] Vanessa I: And how do you encourage people to do all this deep work? Because the truth of the matter is that in the world we operate today, there are so many shortcuts around staying on the surface, working on our image, working on our branding.

[00:08:52] I mean, things that are actually quick fixes or things that are easy to get with a lot of dopamine attached to it. What you are describing is a lot of very deep work. Like if you think of, okay, I'm not very good, like, I don't know, at system thinking, and I want to improve on my ability to do system thinking, it's most probably a two year undertaking.

[00:09:13] It's going to take me a lot of hard work and deep work to get there. So how do we encourage people to actually do these six disciplines that are really meaningful and powerful, but require a lot of preparation, I guess. 

[00:09:26] Michael W: No, for sure. Right. That's again, a great question. I think you, first of all, you convince people that if they don't do it, they're not going to succeed.

[00:09:33] Right. But in the end, their ability to get to the top of organizations is going to depend on their strategic thinking ability. Right. And so that should be helpful in terms of motivation. I think the second thing I would say is you can get better, so have hope. I mean, this wouldn't have been all that interesting if the answer had been in the end, either Vanessa has it or Vanessa doesn't have it, right?

[00:09:54] It's much more interesting if you say, look, whatever your endowment, I call it, is, there's things you can do to get better. And I try throughout the book and at the end to provide ideas of how to do that. I think finally, it's just, there are things you can do that don't take that much time that can help you build your strategic thinking ability, simple exercises.

[00:10:14] And I think of it as very much like an exercise program, like a physical fitness program. It's kind of a mental fitness program you can engage in. I personally, I play four or five online games every day. I start with Wordle, which lots of people play, which is a word game in the New York Times. I then go to a really interesting game, also a New York Times game, called Connections.

[00:10:34] It's about finding relationships between different words, right, which is kind of interesting. I play another game over on the Washington Post site, but it's a more kind of word recognition game. I didn't grow up being a chess player, but my boys are chess players, and so I try. I usually fail to play chess with them, but chess. com has a daily chess puzzle that takes you maybe 10 minutes to think about, right? And so I think game playing can be a way to keep working those mental muscles. And there are other simple exercises that I sort of proposed through the book. And so to your point, I guess it may take a while. But it's like so many things if you devote a modest amount of time to it every single day, you're going to see the cumulative benefits over time.

[00:11:15] If you think you've got to make a massive investment or it's never going to happen, you're probably not going to in the end do it for exactly the reasons that you pointed to. 

[00:11:23] Vanessa I: Thank you. I mean, we have so many reasons to buy the book tomorrow when it's available for us outside of the U. S. 

[00:11:30] Vanessa T: We'll be clicking on, on the buy button very, very soon.

[00:11:34] Michael W: Tell your family. 

[00:11:35] Vanessa T: Absolutely. Michael, we've covered so much ground with you today, talking about some of the work that you've done in the past, still today on transitions, and then also the current work that you're doing in AI, as well as in your new book, Strategic Thinking. If you could just wrap up the top three advices that you would give to leaders, what would that be?

[00:11:55] Michael W: Well, so with respect to transitions, right? Which is maybe a good place to start. Be intentional and planful about how you transition. I mean, that's the core of what I'm proposing. Use a framework for doing it. Focus early on, on the learning and connecting and try to get yourself up the learning curve and as connected as quickly as possible.

[00:12:13] And that's going to help you everywhere. With the strategic thinking piece, I think recognize that it is an essential skill for leadership, and if you don't feel like you're a great strategic thinker, recognize you can get better and recognize that there are ways that fairly simple with requiring some discipline ways that you can get better at, yeah, but just anticipate that.

[00:12:34] Given the amount of change, I mean, I think we cut back to what we talked about at the beginning, right? We're at a time of extraordinary change and really think about how are you going to develop yourself to lead your organizations through that very challenging future? What's it going to take for you to be an effective leader given the times we face?

[00:12:53] Vanessa I: Fantastic. Well, thank you, Michael. It's a great privilege for both of us to listen to you today. I always try to imagine your voice when I was rereading your book, the first 90 days, so many times. So now I will be able to really hear your voice while I'm reading it again. 

[00:13:10] Michael W: In your dreams, in your dreams and your nightmares.

[00:13:12] Vanessa T: Yeah. 

[00:13:15] Vanessa I: But it's okay. I mean, it's fine. It's such a great privilege. And we wanted to thank you for your contribution to the HR profession, because this is very extraordinary for us to have the incredible knowledge and thinking of someone like you to support us in what we do. We are a lonely profession, I must say.

[00:13:33] And when we have people like you, who is able to talk to us and give us some great frameworks, it makes us much stronger. And it makes us actually feeling less lonely. So thank you for your contribution to all of us on behalf of our profession. Well, you're 

[00:13:48] Michael W: welcome. And it's great to be able to spend some time talking with you.

[00:13:51] Vanessa I: So we wish you all the best with this new launch. We will do everything we can around us to support you. And we look forward to meeting you in person one day. Absolutely. Thanks so much. everyone. Thank you for listening to us and talk to you soon on the Career Transition Podcast.