Tom Davis Leadership Podcast – Episode 10

Strategic planning and thinking

In the tenth episode of the Tom Davis podcast, your host Christine Reidhead asks Tom on his thoughts about strategy and strategic thinking.

Key points from the podcast episode;

• Tom’s take on strategy and strategic thinking.
• How organizations should go about a 5-year strategic plan.

He starts up by saying that when we talk about strategy, we should be talking about the future. He continues and says that group wisdom is important because people who surround you, have different cultures and bring creativity in various kinds of ways which helps in being strategic.

Mr. Davis states how in the future, people are going to be able to use artificial intelligence in order to implement some of the instrumentation used in metrology to make complex inventions.

Preparing for a future that hasn’t happened yet is strategic thinking and requires people to ask questions and use discussions to do research. This enables people to somehow reach a strategic conclusion and develop a strategic plan that’s going to move them in the frontier of technology.

The whole idea is to start moving in a strategic direction so when it becomes imperative, then you are already there. When we do strategic thinking, we have to think about the unintended consequences of what we are doing, and also how it relates to the values that we hold. This is part of strategic thinking and strategic placement. We should understand the consequences in order to help people succeed in an organization.

Christine, later on, asks Tom how an organization should go about things if it wants to do a 5-year strategic plan. Tom says that we have to set some goals. He says he tends to set objectives by identifying a process first, that involves identifying people who are going to be involved. He talks up the need for setting a budget that works for the strategic plan in the 5-year plan.

Tom states that a 5-year plan should be a living document that changes based on several things and criteria. Listen to podcast episode and get to hear some of the things Tom has to say about strategic planning.