Strategic thinking: what a museum teaches business leaders

In this Italian-language video, shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I say that strategy is not a document but a way of thinking, and that a museum like the Met shows this well. Here, drawing on the essay in which Jeanne Liedtka described it, I try to explain what that way of thinking consists of and why a company has to turn it into a method.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

I am here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A place that, like few others, stands for the idea of culture as construction and as a system.

And after all, my work starts right here: with observation, with analysis and with the ability to read contexts.

I am not here as a tourist.

I am here because New York, and places like this one, are the right place to talk about strategy.

A business strategist helps companies prepare to challenge their own market.

It is not only about marketing or communications, but about building coherence, vision and solidity.

It means working on structure, on decision-making processes, on clarity of language and on identity.

In a way, it is similar to what happens in a museum like the Met: collecting, arranging, interpreting, to give the present a new meaning.

Strategy is not a document, but a way of thinking.

And in a place like this, where every choice is designed to last over time, it is easy to remember that every company, like every work of art, is born from a clear vision.

At the Met you can see a way of thinking

The Metropolitan Museum describes its mission in one sentence: it “collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across time and cultures.” Behind those verbs lies a way of working that has lasted more than a century and a half. Every acquisition is a bet on what will matter fifty years from now; every gallery brings together objects that were made far apart from one another; every exhibition offers a reading of the present that starts from the past.

Strategy is a way of thinking before it is a document, and this way of thinking can be described.

Strategic thinking has five traits

In 1998 Jeanne M. Liedtka, a strategy scholar at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, published an essay in Long Range Planning with a question in its title: “Strategic Thinking: Can It Be Taught?” Drawing together what the literature had said up to then, she proposed describing strategic thinking through five traits.

Jeanne Liedtka described strategic thinking through five traits: a systems perspective, a clear intent, intelligent opportunism, thinking in time, hypotheses to be tested.

A systems perspective means seeing the whole company and its context, and understanding how a choice made at one point affects the rest. A clear intent, which Liedtka calls being intent-focused, is the direction that guides attention and holds efforts together. Intelligent opportunism makes it possible to seize what the plan had not foreseen, without losing that direction. Thinking in time links the past, the present and the future. Working with hypotheses to be tested is how a good strategy moves forward: you form an idea, put it to the test, correct it.

On thinking in time, Liedtka draws on the political scientist Richard Neustadt and the historian Ernest May, who in 1986 had written Thinking in Time for people who make decisions in public life. Their most quoted line says that the future has nowhere to come from except the past, and that this is why the past helps to predict it. The past, then, is a way to ask better questions about what is changing.

A collection works like a strategy

A museum like the Met combines many of these traits in a single act. Collecting means having an intent: you buy what strengthens a collection. Arranging means looking at the system, because a work of art changes meaning depending on what stands beside it. Interpreting means thinking in time, reading the past to say something to the present. And every display is a hypothesis that visitors, scholars and time will put to the test.

Liedtka adds a point that supporters of “thinking versus planning” often forget. The literature, she writes, seems to suggest that strategic thinking is incompatible with planning as we know it; but we cannot stop paying attention to how a strategy takes shape. Planning has to be transformed “in a way that incorporates, rather than undermines, strategic thinking.” A museum also has its plans, its budgets and its acquisition rules, and the collection holds together precisely because those plans serve a way of thinking.

From talent to method

Liedtka also observes that “it is individuals who think strategically, not organizations.” For a company, this is a limitation. If strategic thinking lives in a single head, the founder’s or a consultant’s, the company loses its direction when that person is not there.

A way of thinking that leaves no written criteria remains a personal talent: in a company it has to become a method that others can use.

That is why, in the work on direction and priorities, part of the result is a set of clear criteria for choosing, written with the owners and left with the company after the engagement ends. Tools and models, such as a strategic framework, help to put the reasoning in order; criteria make it repeatable by people who were not there when it was worked out. This is what makes business strategy something more than a document: a way of deciding that the company can use on its own, as a museum does when it stays consistent even as its directors change. In practice, this is where the work of a business strategist comes in.

What to do and what not to do

• Before approving a plan, ask which hypothesis it is testing and how you will know the outcome.
• Look at every important choice across the whole company, not only in the department that proposes it.
• Write down the criteria used to decide, so that strategic thinking does not stay with a single person.
• Do not use the phrase “strategy is a way of thinking” as a reason to do without planning.
• Do not confuse a model or a diagram with the reasoning that has to use it.

Sources

• Jeanne M. Liedtka, “Strategic Thinking: Can It Be Taught?”, Long Range Planning, 31 (1), 1998, pp. 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-6301%2897%2900098-8
• Richard E. Neustadt, Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, Free Press, 1986.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “About The Met.” https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met