is manifest in a wide range of circumstances, independent of basic intelligence. Given this, we do not consider intelligence to play a distinguishing role in strategic thinking or strategic leadership. Instead, we consider several other cognitive characteristics to be important, including the following:
■ The ability to recognize and take advantage of personal strengths and mitigate personal weaknesses,
■ Comfort with and ability to understand complexity,
■ The ability to recognize related concepts and principles,
■ Self-confidence and belief in oneself,
■ Comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty,
■ A willingness to take risks,
■ The courage of conviction,
■ The willingness to draw conclusions and make decisions, and
■ Personal assertiveness.
These cognitive characteristics consistently have been proven to correlate with creativity.4
We believe that cognitive activities associated with the creative process5 enable strategic thinking. These activities – while perhaps not always discrete or linear – typically include the following:
■ Preparation: Becoming familiar with existing works, what has been done, how challenges are typically addressed, and how opportunities are typically seized.
■ Incubation: Allocating time to the creative process, such that ideas and thoughts combine and awareness and understanding materialize.
■ Insight: Combining existing concepts, principles, frameworks, and models to form new relationships, combinations, associations, or structures.
■ Verification: Assessing and elaborating on new ideas to determine whether they are likely to be brought to fruition and molded into a complete product.
Whether your approach to problem solving and decision making involves sequential steps or taking intuitive leaps may depend partly on what research psychologist Gary Klein describes as System 1 and System 2 thinking.6 System 1 thinking involves applying instinct and intuition, which are in essence experience-based and expertise-driven. System 2 thinking involves applying and following preestablished steps and procedures. System 1 is somewhat unstructured, emergent, and omnidirectional, while System 2 is linear, somewhat rigidly sequenced, and unidirectional. While System 2 will help ensure you do not make serious mistakes in your logic or thinking, it alone is not enough. Much like the list of drill-down, cumulative construction–type questions we cited earlier, System 2 thinking alone proves inadequate in terms of raising, considering, and addressing the myriad issues in our complex, ambiguous, and uncertain world. System 1 thinking is much more effective at raising these issues.
In his influential book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman7 provides examples of activities attributed to System 1 thinking:
■ Determining that one object in the distance is closer than another.
■ Looking toward the direction of a loud and sudden sound.
■ Completing the phrase “peanut butter and…”
■ Making a “sad face” when shown a heartbreaking photo.
■ Detecting anger in someone's voice.
■ Understanding two- to three-word sentences.
■ Driving a vehicle on an empty road.
Kahneman also provides examples attributed to System 2 thinking:
■ Looking for a person wearing a red hat.
■ Walking faster than normal.
■ Self-monitoring and self-regulating your behavior.
■ Stating your telephone number.
■ Comparing and contrasting the value of consumer goods.
■ Completing and submitting the annual tax form.
■ Evaluating a complex logical argument.
Just like the two types of questions highlighted earlier, System 1 and System 2 thinking both serve different purposes.
We believe that System 1 and System 2 exploration is not an either-or proposition. Rather, we consider both to be conducive to credible analysis and exploration. The issue therefore is not which System to apply but, rather, when to emphasize each and what risks to consider when placing too much emphasis on one or the other. More specifically, when should you apply a process-driven methodology and when should you broaden your thinking to include or emphasize intuition or instinct? What are the trade-offs or risks of placing too much emphasis on one type of thinking and too little on the other?
While the preceding exploration focuses heavily on the internal cognitive process, it is imperative that the internal process occurs with conscious awareness of context. Alva Noë, a professor of philosophy and expert in the theory of perception, emphasizes the importance of paying attention both to what one is doing and how one is doing it at any given moment:
Suppose I am a hiker. I walk along and move my legs in all sorts of subtle ways to follow a path along a trail. But the steps I take and the way I move my legs are modulated by, controlled by, the textures and bumps and patterns of the trail itself. There is a kind of locking in. To study experience, to think about the nature of experience, is to look at this two-way dynamic exchange between the world and the active perceiver.8
Context is as critical to the leaders' thinking as it is to the hiker's walk.
Conversations with Bobby Duby,9 a world-class hunter, showcase these tenets. Bobby is a hunter even hunting opponents like. He takes steps to follow all state laws pertaining to wildlife conservation and hunting, only kills enough animals to provides an adequate amount of meat for his family, takes steps to leave only footprints behind when leaving a hunting area, works with local wildlife officers when he comes across illegal or questionable practices, and does all that he can to help ensure the animals he shoots do not suffer. He also takes steps to level the playing field. For example, he only hunts with a compound bow, hunts only on land in which game has escape routes, and does not bait his prey. Bobby realizes taking these steps comes with a price; in all likelihood, they decrease his success as a hunter. This is noteworthy given that some people pay professional guides up to $15,000 to $20,000 to hunt as he does and where he does.
While attempting to follow the hunting principles of his forefathers, what does Bobby do to increase the odds of his hunting trips being successful? In many ways, he applies the thought processes and discovery methods we have highlighted here – for example:
■ Bobby believes that there is no substitute for hunting time. The more time you spend in the field, the more likely you are to succeed as a hunter.
■ He relies heavily on his intuition, which he believes is strengthened each hunting season. In seeking to strengthen his intuition,
F. Barron and D. M. Harrington, “Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality,”
R. Keith Sawyer,
Gary Klein, “Insight,” in
Daniel Kahneman,
Alva Noë, “Life Is the Way the Animal Is in the World,” In
Bobby Duby, interview with the authors, August 27, 2014.
