Thinking Strategically About Impact

You’re in charge of using the power of story. Takes a lot of strategy, a lot of planning. What would you say is the most essential element of strategic thinking?

Yeah, I think part of what goes into doing strategic thinking well is actually, again, is to create the space to do it. So especially in a startup and in a tech company, everything is just running really, really fast and you’re moving so quickly and it’s like you’re execute, execute, execute that it’s like actually saying, hey, we need to take a moment, we need to step back and really, again, say, okay, well, strategically, what are we trying to achieve?
And again, it comes back to saying, here’s this vision, here’s this idea that we’re going after, and having that clarity of that vision. And then really putting the plan in place to go after it. But it’s really interesting because even within our member base, we see that members or folks who are working with BetterUp are actually feeling like over a period of time, that they’ve improved their strategic thinking by, I’m 28% more likely to be strong at strategic planning.
And it’s because they’ve learned how to create space for themselves, right? And they’ve learned how to actually take a moment to step back and say, we don’t have to just keep running, but we have to look for where’s that impact? And I think that the other piece to it is just really helping the team understand how to assess impact and as a leader to say, where can we actually have the most impact? And having that really guide what the strategy is versus looking at, okay, what are all the activities we’re doing?