Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Strategic Thinking, Lateral Thinking & Blah

Once every while, I hear statements from the wise and not-so-wise about how one is / should be a ‘Design Thinker’; ‘Systems Thinker’; ‘Strategic Thinker’; ‘Lateral Thinker’ and so on. And you ask them to define what it is, you will get a different answer every time (even from the same person!)

Instead of letting the world struggle, I thought I would provide my own definitions for each of these — no no, not in a sarcastic way. :)

Lateral Thinking

‘Lateral Thinking’ is abused and uttered so many times in so many contexts; leave aside the numerous (erstwhile email/SMS forwards to the now) Whatsapp forwards with puzzles.

Thankfully, there is one book that can clarify everything about it for us — Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. I have read it a few times with new nuggets picked up every time, so it is sort of clear in my head. While I will likely write a post about it in detail after my next read, in short, I would explain it in short as follows:

This is how we usually think of a solution to a problem — We go through a series of steps, with one leading to another and finally arriving at a solution. Bono calls this as Vertical Thinking, with one logical idea leading to another logical idea, step-wise. If you do not clearly know how to move from one step to another, you stop progressing till you find out how or you simply consider that idea as invalid and go back by a few steps to start again with a different solution

Now, first get rid of the notion that every step should neatly fall into place after the previous step. Allow several ‘intermediate impossibles’, that is, steps/ideas which look impossible, impractical, foolish etc. and simply proceed further into the next steps. That is Lateral Thinking for you. When you do this, Bono’s notion is that you will get more ideas and then get rid of the intermediate impossible or simply find a way to make it possible.

Finally, even with Lateral Thinking, it should all fall in place at the end of the thinking/brainstroming exercise with every step meaningfully leading to the next. Otherwise it is just a hotpotch of ideas with no meaningful action to take. Lateral Thinking is only a tool to get unstuck. After that, you should go back to Vertical Thinking.

Bono says that we need Lateral Thinking only about 5% of the times — Rest of the times, Vertical Thinking is what will help us live in the world.

Systems Thinking

There is no single book that I have come cross to understand this, though I hear “Fifth Discipline” is one. Should read it sometime.

Nonetheless, my understanding of this concept is:

Actually taking a step back from the problem being solved and look at the thing (which has the problem) from a macro perspective — on other things that affect this thing and get affected by this thing.

Now, taking it to technology products: this could be different software products, different components within a software product, different objects/ classes within a component and so on.

So, it is about thinking macro than getting bogged down by the details of a problem in silo.

This will help while designing a system, while fixing a problem within a system and so on.

And yeah, I could be completely wrong on this. For now, when someone says ‘Systems Thinking’, this is what flashes to my mind just so that I do not get confused.

Design Thinking

Well, this is so common these days in the tech industry — everyone wants to be/ to hire ‘design thinking’, particularly among product managers and of course, designers.

Personally, I have been thoroughly confused with this. I did read the book (at least three fourths of it) “Change By Design” IDEO’s CEO but did not fully grasp what it could be. Sometimes, the book simply looked to be a PR exercise to hire great designers into IDEO.

Nonetheless, here is my understanding of Design Thinking, in the world of Tech Businesses. I specifically say this because I think the term has been used for really long and in many contexts, including town planning & stuff, areas I am least familiar with.

Design thinking is a bunch of problem solving techniques that can be applied to a problem, instead of trying things ad hoc. This could include structured brainstorming (done in groups), mind mapping (done individually)and the like, which you would have come across.

If you had noticed, these are basically ways to create some clarity in ambiguous situations, get unstuck and to move forward to a solution. Well, if it sounds like we just talked about it in Lateral Thinking, it indeed is. I realize I just wrote the same thing again in slightly different words. :).

So, let us conclude that Design Thinking is a more organized type of Lateral Thinking with specific techniques attempted for the domain in question

Strategic Thinking

Yet another abused term this. I have been complimented to being one; I have been given feedback that I need to develop these skills; and I have been part of discussions where we have debated the strategic thinking capabilities of other individuals. I am fairly sure that no one (the one who complimented me, the one who gave me the feedback or any of those in those meetings) had a common understanding of what Strategic thinking is. Well, may be only the guy who complimented me. ;-)

And there is also this thing called ‘Strategic Planning’. For long, I thought Strategic planning is done by Strategic thinking but no. Looks like they are different stuff. From what I understand, Strategic thinking answers the ‘What do we do’ question while Strategic planning answers the ‘How do we do’ question. And of course, there is this ‘Why do we do’ (popularized by Simon Sinek’s video — don’t tell anyone, this video sounds so hollow to me, actually) that also becomes Strategic thinking!

To make things simple, this is what I define it to myself as:

A strategic plan (or Strategy) is a long term plan, arrived at, after thinking through all possible angles, with inputs from all possible sources, creating all possible hypotheses, considering all possible outcomes and asking all sorts of questions (including Why of course — many of them). The thinking done here is called Strategic thinking.

Needless to say, doing all these all the time would mean analysis paralysis. So effective strategic thinkers would have a bunch of tools (standard ones like the Porter ones, BCG, McKinsey frameworks etc. and new ones like what Asymco, Stratechery offer; along with one’s own tools & 2x2s appropriate to the context, a latticework of mental models, if you will) to do it faster and in a more effective way.

Any thinking done without all these deliberations (and hopefully its impact being minimal) can be considered “Tactical thinking”.

With this explanation, the thumb rule of “strategy” means long term and “tactic” means short term is fairly correct.

On this aspect (of strategy versus tactic), I found a gem of an insight in Andy Grove’s High Output Management. It says — What is strategy at one level is tactic at the level higher than that. Makes complete sense to me. For a ‘Growth Hacker’ in a product company, the plan he has for the next year would be ‘strategic’ but to the CPO, the next year’s plan for user growth is ‘tactical’ towards a larger objective. And this CPO’s ‘strategy’ would be ‘tactic’ to say the CEO, if it happens to be a company with multiple products/product lines. And so on.

So, that was all the Blah about.