Strategic Thinking: Seeing Further, Choosing Better

By the end

What you'll build

• Distinguish goals, objectives, strategy and tactics, and identify which of the four is missing from a proposal
• Write a diagnosis that names an obstacle as a mechanism, states a checkable prediction, and admits what you have not checked
• Apply the refusal test to any document claiming to be a strategy, and name what it forbids
• Describe a recurring problem as a system of stocks, flows, feedback loops and delays, without blaming an individual
• Trace second-order consequences three steps out and run a pre-mortem that produces early warning signs with owners
• Separate claim from evidence, name the load-bearing assumption in a plan, and state the cost of checking it
• Steelman the strongest case against your own position and respond by conceding, mitigating or accepting risk explicitly
• Build a reference class from comparable past cases and correct an optimistic estimate using base rates
• Sort decisions by reversibility, match the depth of process to the stakes, and convert an irreversible decision into a reversible one
• Write a one-page strategy containing a diagnosis, named refusals with their costs, and a review trigger with a date and an owner

The shape of it

How this course works