1. Overview

Individuals with Strategizing skills are innovative, big-picture thinkers whose creativity is fuelled by a sense of curiosity and an ability to draw rich insights. Strategizers often take on the trendsetter role, and are first to try out a product, listen to a newly released song, or wear an item of clothing before it reaches the masses. They are very good at assessing future opportunities and recognizing risks which might not be obvious to other personalities. However, Strategizers may find it difficult to communicate their vision to people around them.

2. Capabilities

Each individual skill set has its own unique strong suits. Some people may have a finely honed skill through past training and experience; others’ may be more nascent. This list of capabilities is our understanding of the Strategizing skill based upon extensive research and interviews.

• Reflective – Individuals with strategic thinking skills crave an understanding of the greater purpose before taking action. They will carefully consider the end goal and overarching reason behind things, and take time to reflect and understand intent more deeply. For example, they are the students in class wondering if they’ll ever use what they are learning. Strategizers attempt to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of their desired direction and destination, often taking time to develop personal mission statements, create vision boards, and set long-term goals. They want to envision the outcome and the overarching mission so they can be intentional when taking action. Those with the Strategizing skill set attempt to understand the big picture by seeking out the higher conscious purpose of their actions in order to invoke change, promote progress, and make a meaningful impact. Similarly, they are so involved in future-oriented thinking that they miss out on the minutia in the present moment—making them appear forgetful when they were really just daydreaming.
• Open-minded – Strategizing individuals have incredibly open minds and enjoy learning about a wide variety of disciplines. They have a tendency to “go all in” with intense focus on something for a short period of time, then move on when they feel there’s more to learn in another area. When assessing a new task or situation, they are excited by discovering its possibilities. Strategizers’ love of variety extends to relationships as well. They enjoy associating with a diverse range of people—including those older and younger, from various cultures, with different interests, and more. They are receptive to diverse views to see multiple sides of an issue. The desire for a diverse peer group often means they place more value on quantity of friends than depth of relationships. This provides them with a consistent flow of new things to learn.
• Identifying Opportunities – The Strategizing skill set have good strategic foresight and anticipatory outlook—they excel at seeing future opportunities and recognizing risks that others might dismiss or simply not recognize. They are able to see things and label them internally as an opportunity or risk, because their brain relates it back to the bigger picture (why they are doing something). A Strategizer whose vision is to start a successful career in finance, for instance, would read about the growing impact of artificial intelligence in the field. Non-strategizing individuals would blow this off as unimportant and keep treading, while strategizing individuals would identify this as a red flag. They are future-oriented, so they are extremely good at anticipating things before they unfold. Strategizing individuals’ heightened awareness of opportunity and risk means they see what’s pertinent to them and their future, and they see the trends others disregard.
• Integrative Thinking – Strategizers can take disparate opportunities they identify in a variety of domains and “connect the dots” to form new and creative ideas. Steve Jobs famously said “Creativity is just connecting things.” In psychology, this form of creativity is known as convergent thinking, which is a problem solving technique in which ideas from different fields or participants are brought together to find a single optimum solution to a clearly defined problem. Strategizing individuals’ ideas function like puzzle pieces which are collected and joined together from all areas. They are orchestrators, amalgamating and directing individual elements together to make a coherent whole. They often use analogies to solve problems, looking at similar industries or domains to see if like solutions can be leveraged in their domain, or by creating a new domain. Strategizers might use this approach combine seemingly unrelated elements to work together to be more effective and use fewer resources. However, these ideas take time to incubate and grow in their reflective minds, so give them time.