Be More Strategic … how to see further, decide smarter, and shape the future … a strategic thinking mindset has never been more valuable, and more misunderstood
September 18, 2025
“I’ve no time to think” says the frantically busy CEO, trying to keep pace with customers and innovation, economic shifts and investor expectations, let alone stay on top of his (or her) inbox.
In an age of relentless speed and constant noise, the ability to think strategically has never been more valuable, or more misunderstood.
Too many people mistake strategy for planning, or for the art of producing a glossy presentation once a year. But true strategic thinking isn’t about prediction or paperwork. It’s about perception, the ability to see what others miss, to simplify complexity, and to act with intention in a world that rarely sits still.
The best strategists — in business, sport, politics, or life — share a certain calmness amid chaos.
They notice patterns that others overlook. They connect dots between emerging trends and human behaviour. They know that being strategic isn’t a single skill, but a mindset — a disciplined way of observing, questioning, and choosing. It’s the difference between reacting to events and shaping them.
This is the essence of Be More Strategic, Charlie Curson’s new guide to thinking and acting with greater clarity and purpose.
I first worked with Charlie 20 years ago, and he always struck me as a calm, curious and thoughtful guy.
Rather than presenting strategy as an intellectual exercise, Curson reframes it as a series of human practices — behaviours anyone can learn, refine, and embody. His framework of twelve essential practices moves from personal awareness to organisational impact, showing that strategy begins not in the boardroom, but in the mind.
Strategy as a Living Practice
Curson begins with a simple but provocative premise: strategy is a behaviour, not a document. It lives in conversations, choices, and everyday decisions — often made under pressure and with limited information. To “be more strategic” is to bring foresight, perspective, and discipline to those moments, ensuring that action aligns with intention.
He divides his twelve practices into four developmental levels:
- Self-Awareness
- Open-Mindedness
- Capabilities
- Impact
Each builds on the last, transforming the way people think, decide, and influence.
1. Building Strategic Self-Awareness
Strategic thinking starts with the self. Before you can understand systems or shape futures, you must understand your own biases, habits, and triggers.
Curson calls this the foundation of strategy — knowing what drives you, what derails you, and how you think under pressure. The best strategists are those who can manage their emotions when others are swept away by urgency or fear. Emotional discipline creates the space for clear thought.
Think of Satya Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft. When he became CEO, he focused first on shifting mindset, not market share. He moved the company away from a culture of know-it-alls to one of learn-it-alls. That began with self-awareness — acknowledging where the company’s thinking had become rigid and defensive. The result was not just new strategy, but renewed curiosity and purpose.
Strategic self-awareness also requires practice — time to think, reflect, and observe. In Curson’s view, leaders should deliberately create “white space” in their calendars: time to step back from the whirlwind of activity and consider the bigger picture. Some of the most strategic organisations — from Amazon to Unilever — institutionalise this by running reflection days, post-mortems, or “stop-doing” reviews, recognising that what you don’t do is as important as what you do.
2. Cultivating Open-Mindedness
Once grounded in self-awareness, Curson turns outward. To think strategically, you must learn to listen deeply, question assumptions, and explore perspectives that challenge your own.
Curiosity, he argues, is the lifeblood of strategy. The leaders who thrive in fast-changing industries are those who remain endlessly curious — about technology, culture, and the future. It’s why companies like Patagonia or Netflix continually evolve; they don’t defend the past, they interrogate it.
Listening, too, is an underrated strategic act. The best strategists don’t dominate conversations — they notice what isn’t being said. A CEO who walks the shop floor or listens to customer service calls often discovers insights more valuable than any management report. True listening reveals the weak signals — small patterns that hint at major shifts ahead.
Finally, critical thinking — the ability to separate fact from assumption, and opinion from evidence — is central to strategic reasoning. In an era of data overload, being rational isn’t about cold detachment; it’s about disciplined curiosity. What is true? What else could be true? What if our basic premise is wrong?
3. Developing Strategic Capabilities
With awareness and openness established, Curson moves into the active skills of strategy — imagination, comfort with uncertainty, and future orientation.
Strategic imagination means seeing possibilities beyond the obvious. It’s the mindset that led Elon Musk to see rockets as reusable, or IKEA to imagine furniture as flat-packed. Creativity, Curson insists, isn’t an optional extra; it’s a core competence of strategic thinkers. They constantly reframe problems, look across industries for inspiration, and ask: “What if we started again today?”
Equally vital is comfort with uncertainty. The strategic thinker doesn’t fear the unknown; they learn from it. In fast-moving environments — like fintech or AI — waiting for complete certainty is paralysis. The art is to make provisional choices, test assumptions, and adapt quickly. This experimental approach defines the best modern strategists, from venture capitalists to climate innovators.
And then comes future focus — the ability to look beyond the immediate. Great strategy blends future-back thinking (starting from a vision of what could be) with now-forward execution. Leaders like Jensen Huang at NVIDIA or Mary Barra at General Motors illustrate this duality: they build today’s business while imagining tomorrow’s industry.
4. Scaling Strategic Impact
The final level is about execution and influence. Strategy only matters if it changes behaviour, mobilises people, and creates results.
First, the strategist must be decisive. Action delayed is opportunity lost. Curson encourages making decisions with “enough” information — not perfect knowledge. It’s about balancing boldness with reflection. Jeff Bezos famously used the 70% rule: make most decisions when you have about 70% of the information you wish you had. Too little, and you’re reckless; too much, and you’re late.
Next comes inclusivity. Strategy isn’t a solo sport; it’s collective sense-making. The most effective leaders draw diverse voices into the process, creating psychological safety so people can challenge ideas and contribute insights. When Schneider Electric or DBS Bank reinvented their strategies, they involved employees at every level — turning vision into shared ownership.
Finally, persuasion. Strategy fails without belief. The ability to communicate a vision, tell a compelling story, and connect strategy to purpose is what turns ideas into movements. Leaders who inspire — from Steve Jobs to Jacinda Ardern — understand that strategy lives in narrative. It’s not just about what you say, but how you make people feel about the future.
Be More Strategic
What makes Be More Strategic distinctive is its humanity. It doesn’t glorify genius or power. It shows that strategy is a practice — a set of repeatable behaviours that can be cultivated by anyone willing to think a little longer and see a little further.
To think strategically is to pause when others rush, to question when others assume, and to focus when others flail. It’s the art of connecting small daily decisions to a larger sense of direction. Whether you’re leading a global company, managing a team, or planning your career, strategic thinking is the difference between drifting and designing your future.
Curson’s message is ultimately optimistic. Strategy is not reserved for the few; it’s a discipline for the many — a way to navigate complexity with clarity and confidence. In a world that celebrates speed, he reminds us that the greatest competitive advantage is still thoughtfulness.
Thinking bigger, smarter, better
Now that we’re thinking, here are five more of my favourite books on thinking.
Genuine thinking has become a rare and radical act. We are drowning in information yet starved of insight. Our minds are busy but not necessarily bright. To think clearly now is to resist the pressure to react, to slow down when everything screams speed.
A new wave of writers — from Daniel Kahneman to Michael Watkins, Megan Reitz, Chirag Gander and Sahil Vaidya — explore how we might reclaim the art of thinking in a noisy, distracted age. And when viewed alongside the provocations of Nassim Nicholas Taleb — the philosopher of uncertainty — their ideas form a striking map of modern intelligence: a guide not only to how we think, but how we might survive our own overconfidence.
Kahneman, the behavioural economist, opened the door. Thinking, Fast and Slow revealed how much of human judgment is governed by two mental systems: the rapid, intuitive “System 1” and the deliberate, analytical “System 2.” His warning was elegant and unsettling — that what we call rationality is often an illusion, that our quick-thinking brains are riddled with cognitive biases and blind spots. We trust patterns that aren’t there; we mistake luck for skill; we prefer the comfort of stories to the chaos of reality.
Taleb, in The Black Swan and Antifragile, takes this further. Where Kahneman studies bias, Taleb exposes hubris. He argues that the world is governed by randomness, that humans are chronically blind to rare, high-impact events, and that our obsession with prediction is our undoing. His answer is not to think faster or plan harder, but to build robustness against uncertainty — to design systems that grow stronger under stress, to think in probabilities not certainties.
If Kahneman diagnoses the mechanics of our flawed minds, Michael Watkins offers a kind of cognitive remedy. His Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking transforms insight into method — a disciplined way of seeing patterns, systems, and possibilities that others miss. For Watkins, strategic thinking is not an innate gift possessed by a few; it’s a practice that can be trained, much like a muscle. Where Kahneman warns of bias, Watkins builds structure. Yet even Watkins’ most rigorous frameworks would resonate with Taleb’s skepticism. Both agree that no strategy survives contact with the unpredictable. The best thinkers, therefore, are those who prepare for volatility — who see not just what is, but what could break. Strategic thinking, in this light, becomes a form of antifragile reasoning: flexible, experimental, alive to surprise.
Then there is Megan Reitz, whose Spaciousness speaks to a subtler, often neglected aspect of thinking: attention. She argues that modern life leaves us no room to think at all. We confuse motion with progress, busyness with purpose. Her concept of “spacious mode” — the ability to slow, reflect, and expand awareness — offers a quiet antidote to the tyranny of urgency. Taleb might call this cultivating optionality: by pausing, we create the possibility of better choices, of seeing the hidden asymmetries in life. Reitz’s work is less about intellectual technique than mental ecology — the inner and outer environments that enable thought to breathe. Without such space, even the sharpest intellect becomes reactive, trapped in what Taleb calls “the noise of small data.”
Chirag Gander and Sahil Vaidya’s Think Like a Minimalist takes the argument in another direction — from depth to clarity. They urge us to declutter not only our physical spaces but our cognitive ones. In an era of complexity, minimalism is not about austerity but about focus. The minimalist thinker, they argue, sees essence over excess, chooses clarity over quantity. It is a principle that Taleb would recognise: he too advocates “via negativa” — improvement by subtraction, the art of removing the unnecessary to strengthen what remains. Complexity often hides fragility; simplicity can reveal resilience. In business and life alike, minimalist thinking becomes a discipline of discernment: knowing what not to think about, what not to do, what not to believe.
Seen together, these authors trace the spectrum of modern thought. Kahneman exposes the traps; Watkins builds the scaffolding; Reitz restores the space; Gander and Vaidya clear the clutter; Taleb shakes the whole edifice and tests what survives. They differ in tone — the scientist, the strategist, the contemplative, the designer, the contrarian — yet they converge on a single truth: that in an uncertain, accelerated world, how we think matters more than what we know.
To think well today requires multiple disciplines. We must be conscious of bias yet bold in imagination. We must design strategies that embrace uncertainty rather than deny it. We must create the conditions — temporal, cultural, emotional — for deeper thought to emerge. We must value subtraction as much as addition. And above all, as Taleb insists, we must be humble before randomness: the recognition that no model, however elegant, can capture the fullness of reality.
Perhaps the art of thinking now lies in synthesis — the ability to move between Kahneman’s analysis and Reitz’s spaciousness, between Watkins’ rigour and Gander’s restraint, between Taleb’s scepticism and creative daring. To think strategically, clearly, and wisely is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to dance with it — to slow the rush of information, to see patterns without clinging to them, to simplify without oversimplifying, and to remain open to the unexpected.
The future will not belong to those who think fastest, nor to those who think most. It will belong to those who think differently — those who make room for doubt, design for resilience, and find clarity amid the noise. In a world addicted to speed and certainty, true strategic intelligence may be nothing more — and nothing less — than the courage to pause, to simplify, and to see.
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