Strategic thinking in Cape Town

Masterclass
Outcomes and strategic thinking skills

• Gathering information: listening, questioning, exploration, insight and synthesis techniques.
• Defining your focus: strategic thinking opportunity analysis
methodology.
• Conducting analysis: analytical thinking assessment solutions.
• Integrating innovation: lateral and creative thinking tools.
• Applied assessment: logical, sequential and systems thinking.
• Robust decision making: consensus and consequence thinking.
• Taking action: planning, project management and risk
management essentials.

Robert Kaplan says to illustrate how individual and organisational biases prevent companies from thinking and planning for risk events. These are some of the problems that he highlights.
1. We are over confident about the accuracy of our forecasts and assessments and consistently underestimate the variance of future events.
2. We anchor our estimates to readily available evidence.
3. We accept information that supports our initial position and suppress information that contradicts it - what he calls cognitive dissonance.
4. When things are not working we escalate out commitment to the original course of action - throw good money after bad.
5. We go along with the flow suppressing objections to actions that the hierarchy endorse.
6. We incubate more risk through the normalisation of deviance as we accept minor failures and defects as normal or false alarms - rather than alerts of imminent danger.
7. We need active intrusive processes to challenge our existing assumptions.

Source: The progress conference on executing strategy

This is where Dr Edward de Bono's thinking tools come in. Creator of Lateral Thinking Skills and The Power of Perception, his Lateral Thinking techniques create a deliberate method to imagine the unimagined and his Power of Perception™ analytical toolkit creates an analytical framework to objectively review situations by adopting all viewpoints. Even viewpoints you may not have imagined.

When 29 and 30 July 2014 - Johannesburg
13 and 14 August 2014 - Cape Town

How much
• Individual delegates [one to four people]
R9 995 per person plus VAT (R1399.30) = R11394.30
• Team delegates [five to nine people]
R8 995 per person plus VAT (R1259.30) = R10 254.30
• Corporate delegates [ten or more people]
R7 995 per person plus VAT (R1 119.30) = R9 114.30

Reserve 10 or more delegates and Save R10,000 or more
(T's & C's apply)

Date: 13 August 2014 to 14 August 2014
Time: 08:00 - 16:30
Venue: Cape Town