Tamsen Webster breaks down Dr. Sloan's three stages: strategic thinking, where you question assumptions and generate ideas; strategic planning, where you decide what to do with that understanding; and strategic implementation, where you execute the plan.
Dr. Sloan separates 3 things that we often combine unintentionally when we're talking about strategy and strategic thinking. She separates strategic thinking from strategic planning from strategic implementation. Thinking is a distinct stage where we are coming up with ideas, where we are generating new ideas, where we're understanding assumptions, where we are expanding our assumptions. We're questioning the way we've always done things so that we might be able to find something new. Strategic planning takes that open dialogue and starts to turn it into a discussion where we decide what to do now that we have a much better understanding of the situation and of the problem. And then, as you might guess, strategic implementation is about putting those plans into action.
