Title: Strategic Thinking — LearnCoachAssist

Q: What is strategic thinking?
A: Strategic thinking is the practice of seeing the broader system, making trade-offs, and choosing actions that create long-term advantage.

Q: Why does strategic thinking matter?
A: It helps people prioritize higher-leverage choices instead of reacting only to immediate tasks.

Q: What is the difference between strategy and planning?
A: Strategy chooses where and how to win; planning organizes the work required to execute that choice.

Q: Why are trade-offs central to strategy?
A: Without trade-offs, priorities stay vague and resources get spread too thin to create advantage.

Q: What is a strategic objective?
A: A strategic objective is a meaningful outcome that guides priorities over a sustained period of time.

Q: What is a strategic constraint?
A: A strategic constraint is a limit, such as time, budget, talent, or regulation, that shapes what options are realistic.

Q: Why should strategy start with diagnosis?
A: Accurate diagnosis clarifies the real problem before teams jump into activity.

Q: What is first-order versus second-order thinking?
A: First-order thinking considers the immediate effect of a move; second-order thinking considers the downstream consequences as well.

Q: What is a competitive advantage?
A: A competitive advantage is a capability or position that allows an organization to outperform alternatives over time.

Q: Why is saying no part of strategy?
A: Clear no decisions protect focus and preserve resources for what matters most.

Q: What is opportunity cost in strategy?
A: Opportunity cost is the value of what you cannot pursue because you chose something else.

Q: What is a strategic lens?
A: A strategic lens is a guiding way of evaluating options, such as growth, retention, efficiency, or differentiation.

Q: What does systems thinking add to strategy?
A: It helps people understand how changes in one area ripple through the rest of the organization or market.

Q: Why should assumptions be explicit in strategy?
A: Explicit assumptions are easier to test and update when reality shifts.

Q: What is scenario thinking?
A: Scenario thinking explores how the strategy would perform under multiple plausible future conditions.

Q: What is a long-term horizon?
A: A long-term horizon is the future period the strategy is trying to shape, not just the next sprint or quarter.

Q: Why do strategic thinkers scan for weak signals?
A: Weak signals can reveal emerging threats or opportunities before they become obvious to everyone.

Q: What is a strategy narrative?
A: A strategy narrative explains the diagnosis, choices, trade-offs, and expected path to results in a coherent story.

Q: What is the role of data in strategic thinking?
A: Data informs strategic thinking, but judgment is still needed to interpret uncertainty and choose among imperfect options.

Q: Why is strategic alignment important?
A: Even a strong strategy fails when teams interpret priorities differently and pull in conflicting directions.

Q: What is strategic debt?
A: Strategic debt is the accumulation of short-term choices that quietly limit future flexibility or advantage.

Q: Why revisit strategy regularly?
A: Conditions change, and good strategy evolves when new evidence shows the original assumptions are no longer sound.

Q: What is a strategic question?
A: A strategic question is a framing prompt that helps teams explore what matters most before committing to a path.

Q: What is an example of a strategic question?
A: "Where can we create the most durable value with the resources we actually have?"

Q: Why should strategy connect to execution?
A: A strategy that never changes what teams do is not functioning as a real strategy.

Q: What is prioritization in strategic terms?
A: Prioritization is choosing which bets deserve disproportionate attention because they have the highest leverage.

Q: What is a strategic bet?
A: A strategic bet is a meaningful commitment made under uncertainty because the upside justifies the risk.

Q: What is the mark of a strategic thinker?
A: They connect immediate choices to long-term consequences and make trade-offs with clarity.

Q: Why do strategic thinkers ask what has changed?
A: Because old decisions become weaker when the environment, customer behavior, or constraints shift.

Q: What is a durable strategic habit?
A: Step back often enough to diagnose the system, choose the few priorities that matter, and align actions to those choices.

Q: Why should strategic thinkers ask what not to do?
A: Constraint and exclusion clarify priorities and make real trade-offs visible.

Q: What is a portfolio view in strategy?
A: A portfolio view looks across multiple bets or initiatives to balance risk, return, and resource concentration.

Q: What is strategic optionality?
A: Strategic optionality is preserving future choices instead of locking into one brittle path too early.

Q: Why is timing part of strategy?
A: A good move at the wrong time can be weaker than a simpler move made when conditions are ready.

Q: What is the difference between signal and noise in strategic work?
A: Signal changes the underlying picture, while noise distracts without meaningfully affecting the choice.

Q: Why should strategy include review triggers?
A: Triggers tell the team when to reassess instead of drifting on autopilot while conditions change.

Q: What is a strategic assumption test?
A: It is a focused experiment or evidence-gathering effort designed to verify a critical belief behind the plan.

Q: What is a wedge strategy?
A: A wedge strategy starts with a narrow, winnable entry point that can expand into a broader advantage later.

Q: Why should strategic communication be simple?
A: If the strategy cannot be explained clearly, execution usually fragments across teams.

Q: What is strategic resilience?
A: Strategic resilience is the ability to adapt direction without losing the core objective when reality changes.

Q: What is a common strategic failure mode?
A: Teams mistake activity for strategy and pursue many initiatives without a coherent advantage.

Q: What is a durable strategic-thinking question?
A: What choice here would still look smart if I had to defend it a year from now?

Q: How does Michael Porter define strategy?
A: Strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are hard to imitate.

Q: What is the "Five Forces" framework used for?
A: It analyzes industry attractiveness by examining rivalry, buyer power, supplier power, substitutes, and new entrants.

Q: What is a Blue Ocean strategy?
A: A Blue Ocean strategy pursues uncontested market space where competition is irrelevant, rather than battling in crowded red oceans.

Q: What is the "Strategy Canvas" tool?
A: It is a Blue Ocean diagnostic that plots the factors an industry competes on to reveal where new value curves can be created.

Q: What is a Value Curve?
A: A Value Curve graphs how a company invests across the industry's competing factors to expose its strategic profile.

Q: What is a "Four Actions Framework" in Blue Ocean?
A: It asks: which factors to eliminate, reduce, raise, and create to build a new value curve.

Q: What does "Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create" help a team do?
A: It forces explicit trade-offs rather than copying incumbents across every competitive factor.

Q: What is a Red Ocean market?
A: A Red Ocean is an existing market where firms compete head-to-head on cost or differentiation in shrinking profit pools.

Q: What is the "ERRC grid"?
A: A worksheet that operationalizes the Four Actions Framework by listing eliminate, reduce, raise, and create moves.

Q: What is "tipping point leadership" in Blue Ocean?
A: It identifies the act or set of acts that can unlock a system of influences blocking strategic change inside an organization.

Q: What is a focused strategy?
A: A focused strategy concentrates on serving a narrow segment better than broad competitors can.

Q: What is cost leadership?
A: Cost leadership aims to be the lowest-cost producer while delivering acceptable value, defending margins through efficiency.

Q: What is differentiation strategy?
A: Differentiation offers unique attributes customers value enough to pay a premium for, while sustaining a premium price.

Q: What is a "best-cost provider"?
A: A best-cost provider delivers slightly better value than rivals at a slightly higher price than the cheapest options.

Q: What is a "stuck in the middle" position?
A: It is a firm that fails to achieve either cost leadership or differentiation, earning subpar returns.

Q: What is a strategic group?
A: A strategic group is a cluster of firms within an industry following a similar strategy or competing on similar dimensions.

Q: What is a PESTEL analysis?
A: PESTEL examines Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal forces shaping an industry's environment.

Q: What is a SWOT analysis?
A: SWOT maps internal Strengths and Weaknesses against external Opportunities and Threats to surface strategic options.

Q: What is TOWS in strategy?
A: TOWS pairs internal and external factors (SO, ST, WO, WT) to generate specific strategic actions.

Q: What is a VRIO framework?
A: VRIO tests whether a resource is Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Organization-ready to support a sustained advantage.

Q: What is "core competence" per Prahalad and Hamel?
A: A core competence is a bundle of skills and knowledge that differentiates a firm and enables new product platforms.

Q: What are the three tests of a core competence?
A: Customer benefit, competitor differentiation, and extendability into new markets or products.

Q: What is a capability in strategy?
A: A capability is a repeatable pattern of activity that turns inputs into outputs reliably and at scale.

Q: What is a resource-based view of the firm?
A: RBV argues that durable advantage comes from owning or controlling resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable.

Q: What is dynamic capability?
A: Dynamic capability is the ability to reconfigure existing resources and routines to match a changing environment.

Q: What is strategic intent?
A: Strategic intent is an ambitious, long-term goal that stretches the organization and focuses effort over years.

Q: What is a "big hairy audacious goal" (BHAG)?
A: A BHAG is a 10-to-30-year audacious target that galvanizes strategic intent across the firm.

Q: What is a strategic intent statement?
A: It is a short, evocative statement that says where the organization is going and why winning there matters.

Q: What is "seven-surprises" in strategy execution?
A: It is a set of predictable, avoidable failures that derail strategy when leadership neglects basic execution disciplines.

Q: What is a "playing to win" choice cascade?
A: It is a sequence of choices: winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities, and management systems.

Q: What is "where to play" in the choice cascade?
A: It defines the markets, customers, geographies, and product categories the strategy will and will not serve.

Q: What is "how to win" in the choice cascade?
A: It specifies the distinctive value the strategy will deliver to chosen customers relative to alternatives.

Q: What is a strategic fit?
A: Strategic fit exists when activities reinforce one another, raising the cost or difficulty of imitation.

Q: What is "activity system mapping"?
A: It diagrams how a firm's activities interconnect to deliver unique value and lock in competitive advantage.

Q: What is the "three horizons" framework?
A: Horizon 1 is core business, Horizon 2 is emerging opportunities, Horizon 3 is future options to be nurtured.

Q: How do you balance the three horizons?
A: Allocate resources, attention, and metrics so the core is defended, emerging bets grow, and options are explored.

Q: What is the "Ansoff Matrix"?
A: It plots growth options across new versus existing products and new versus existing markets, yielding four cells.

Q: What is market penetration?
A: Market penetration grows sales of current products to current markets, often through pricing, promotion, or distribution.

Q: What is market development?
A: Market development takes existing products to new geographies, segments, or use cases.

Q: What is product development?
A: Product development creates new offerings for existing customers by leveraging known relationships and channels.

Q: What is diversification?
A: Diversification introduces new products to new markets, increasing both risk and potential reward.

Q: What is related diversification?
A: Related diversification leverages visible linkages, like shared technology or channels, between the new and existing business.

Q: What is unrelated diversification?
A: Unrelated diversification spreads bets across businesses with little operational linkage, primarily a financial-portfolio logic.

Q: What is a "real option" in strategy?
A: A real option is the right, but not the obligation, to invest further once new information or conditions arrive.

Q: Why use real options thinking?
A: It limits downside while preserving upside by staging investment in stages and gating on new information.

Q: What is a "killer feature" trap?
A: It is the assumption that one superior feature alone will beat a competitor's integrated, reinforcing activity system.

Q: What is a "good to great" concept of the Hedgehog?
A: It is the intersection of passion, best-in-world talent, and the economic engine that drives profitability.

Q: What is the "flywheel" concept?
A: A flywheel is a reinforcing cycle where each push makes subsequent pushes easier, compounding momentum.

Q: What is strategic patience?
A: Strategic patience is the willingness to keep investing in a sound bet while short-term results disappoint.

Q: What is "good strategy, bad strategy"?
A: Good strategy defines a clear diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions; bad strategy is fluff dressed as goals.

Q: What is "fluff" in bad strategy?
A: Fluff is vague, abstract, or motivational language substituted for the hard work of identifying real trade-offs.

Q: What is a guiding policy in strategy?
A: A guiding policy channels action by specifying the approach that will overcome diagnosed obstacles.

Q: What are "coherent actions" in strategy?
A: They are the coordinated set of moves that implement the guiding policy and reinforce one another.

Q: What is a "kernel" of good strategy?
A: A kernel is the unit of good strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions that follow.

Q: What is "strategic positioning"?
A: Positioning is the deliberate choice of where the firm will sit relative to rivals, customers, and forces in the market.

Q: What is a "beachhead" segment?
A: A beachhead is a small, accessible market segment chosen as the entry point to scale into a broader strategy.

Q: What is a "minimum viable strategy"?
A: It is the smallest set of coherent choices that, if executed, can be tested against real customer response.

Q: What is a strategic milestone?
A: A strategic milestone is a defined outcome that signals meaningful progress and warrants a re-examination of the plan.

Q: What is "killer assumption" identification?
A: It is the practice of naming the assumption that, if wrong, would invalidate the entire strategy.

Q: What is a "pre-mortem"?
A: A pre-mortem imagines the strategy has failed and works backward to identify the most likely causes of failure.

Q: What is a "pre-parade"?
A: A pre-parade envisions the strategy succeeding and writes the future press release to clarify its intended impact.

Q: What is a "regret minimization" frame?
A: Jeff Bezos' frame: project forward and pick the option you would least regret not having tried.

Q: What is "working backward" from the customer?
A: Start with the customer need and the experience you want, then design the product, operations, and economics backward.

Q: What is a "10x" mindset?
A: A 10x mindset targets order-of-magnitude improvement by rethinking the basis of competition, not 10% better.

Q: What is incremental versus transformational strategy?
A: Incremental strategy improves today's business; transformational strategy reshapes the business model or industry.

Q: What is a business model?
A: A business model specifies how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value for its stakeholders.

Q: What is "business model innovation"?
A: It is the redesign of how value is created, priced, delivered, or captured, often beyond product or service changes.

Q: What is a platform strategy?
A: A platform connects producers and consumers of complementary value, capturing value through network effects and governance.

Q: What is a network effect?
A: A network effect is the phenomenon where a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it.

Q: What are direct network effects?
A: Direct network effects occur when more users of one side make the product more useful for all users.

Q: What are indirect (cross-side) network effects?
A: They arise when growth in one user side makes the platform more valuable for users on the other side.

Q: What is a two-sided market?
A: A two-sided market serves two distinct user groups whose participation jointly creates value for the other side.

Q: What is a "winner-take-all" market?
A: A winner-take-all market concentrates value in one or a few players because of strong network effects and switching costs.

Q: What are switching costs?
A: Switching costs are the time, money, or effort a customer faces to change to a different product or provider.

Q: What is a moat?
A: A moat is a durable structural protection, like network effects, scale, or brand, that defends long-term returns.

Q: What is a "flywheel moat"?
A: A flywheel moat is a self-reinforcing cycle that compounds advantage and is hard for rivals to replicate.

Q: What is "disruptive innovation" per Christensen?
A: A new entrant initially serves an overlooked segment with a simpler, cheaper offering before moving upmarket.

Q: What is low-end disruption?
A: Low-end disruption targets over-served customers at the bottom of an existing market with a "good enough" offering.

Q: What is new-market disruption?
A: New-market disruption creates demand among non-consumers who previously could not afford or use the existing product.

Q: What is a "jobs to be done" frame?
A: Customers "hire" products to do specific jobs in their lives; strategy is stronger when anchored to those jobs.

Q: What is a "milkshake job" insight?
A: Christensen's example: a milkshake was hired for a long, boring commute, not just for flavor, reshaping product design.

Q: What is a "value proposition"?
A: A value proposition is the bundle of benefits and price a target customer will choose over the next best alternative.

Q: What is a "go-to-market" strategy?
A: Go-to-market defines the ICP, positioning, channels, and motions used to deliver the product to repeatable revenue.

Q: What is an ideal customer profile (ICP)?
A: An ICP describes the firmographic and behavioral traits of the account most likely to succeed and expand.

Q: What is a beachhead market?
A: It is the first market the company commits to win, chosen for accessibility, references, and spillover potential.

Q: What is "land and expand"?
A: Land and expand wins a small foothold in an account, then broadens usage across teams, divisions, or use cases.

Q: What is a "bowling alley" go-to-market?
A: Sequencing target accounts like bowling pins so wins in one create references and entry to adjacent customers.

Q: What is "big-bang" versus "sniper" go-to-market?
A: Big-bang targets many segments at once; sniper focuses resources on a small, high-yield set of accounts.

Q: What is channel conflict?
A: Channel conflict arises when overlapping routes to market undercut one another on price, margin, or attention.

Q: What is a strategic partnership?
A: A partnership is an agreement where firms combine capabilities to pursue goals neither can reach efficiently alone.

Q: What is coopetition?
A: Coopetition is the simultaneous cooperation and competition between firms that partner in some areas while competing in others.

Q: What is a vertical integration strategy?
A: Vertical integration expands the firm's scope into upstream suppliers or downstream channels to control more of the value chain.

Q: What is a horizontal integration strategy?
A: Horizontal integration consolidates competitors or peers to gain scale, share, or capabilities in the same layer.

Q: What is a "make vs. buy" decision?
A: It weighs the long-term cost and capability implications of producing an activity in-house versus sourcing it externally.

Q: What is outsourcing risk in strategy?
A: Outsourcing can erode in-house capability, create vendor dependency, and reduce strategic flexibility over time.

Q: What is a "core vs. context" decision?
A: Core activities protect the strategic advantage; context activities are candidates for outsourcing, automation, or simplification.

Q: What is strategic intent versus strategic action?
A: Intent declares the destination; action is the sequenced set of coherent moves that close the gap to that destination.

Q: What is a "sandbox" in strategy?
A: A sandbox is a small, protected environment for testing a new strategic bet without risking the core business.

Q: What is a "skunkworks"?
A: A skunkworks is a small, autonomous team charged with pursuing a strategically important breakthrough with minimal constraints.

Q: What is "design thinking" in strategy?
A: It is a human-centered approach to framing and reframing problems before committing to a strategic direction.

Q: What is a strategic reframing?
A: Reframing redefines the problem in a way that opens up better solutions than the original framing allows.

Q: What is a "default option" bias in strategy?
A: Teams often pick the path of least resistance, mistaking convenience for strategic merit.

Q: What is the "sunk cost" trap?
A: Sunk cost bias causes teams to keep investing in a failing course because of what they have already spent.

Q: What is "escalation of commitment"?
A: It is the tendency to double down on a losing strategy to justify earlier decisions, often worsening outcomes.

Q: What is "confirmation bias" in strategy?
A: Confirmation bias leads teams to favor information that supports existing plans and discount contradictory evidence.

Q: What is "strategy as hypothesis"?
A: It treats strategic choices as testable propositions about cause and effect, with explicit success criteria.

Q: What is a strategic OKR?
A: A strategic OKR is an objective plus key results that together define a meaningful, measurable piece of strategy progress.

Q: What is a strategic narrative?
A: It is the story of why the firm will win, told in a way that aligns the organization to a few clear choices.

Q: What is a "red team" in strategy?
A: A red team is a group assigned to attack the strategy and surface the strongest counterarguments and blind spots.

Q: What is "wardley mapping"?
A: Wardley Maps plot components of a value chain against stages of evolution to guide build-versus-buy and timing decisions.

Q: What is the "Pioneer-Settler-Town Planner" model?
A: PST categorizes corporate work into exploration (Pioneer), near-term scaling (Settler), and efficiency (Town Planner).

Q: What is an "exploit vs. explore" trade-off?
A: Exploit refines known returns; explore searches for new options. Both are needed, balanced by senior leadership.

Q: What is an ambidextrous organization?
A: An ambidextrous organization runs current businesses efficiently while exploring future ones, often through separate structures.

Q: What is a "kill criterion"?
A: A kill criterion is a predefined threshold of evidence that, if hit, terminates a strategic bet and frees resources.

Q: What is a strategic dashboard?
A: A strategic dashboard is a small set of leading and lagging indicators that track whether the strategy is working.

Q: What is a leading versus lagging indicator?
A: Leading indicators predict future performance; lagging indicators confirm past results. Strategy needs both.

Q: What is a "north star metric"?
A: A north star metric is the single measure that best captures the value the strategy is creating for customers.

Q: What is the "Rule of Three and Four"?
A: In mature markets, three dominant players share 70-90% of profit while the rest survive on niches or no profit.

Q: What is "good money after bad" in strategy?
A: It is the warning that adding resources to a broken strategic bet usually fails and burns capital that could be redirected.

Q: What is a "merger of equals"?
A: A merger of equals combines two similarly sized firms under shared governance, framed as a partnership rather than acquisition.