Five steps, and a question with the right width

Rapid technical change has sent many firms that could not adapt into the past, and has brought new firms up on the back of the same change. The movement is faster than it was, and many companies work, in more than one direction, to stay alive in an unstable setting. Strategic thinking has come to sit near the centre of that work, and can sound grand, as if it asked for a rare gift; in daily life, people already use it, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.

Five steps are set out. The first is to define the problem: in a given situation, what actually has to be resolved. The second is to structure it: which factors bear on the problem, and what approach is logical. The third is to form hypotheses and to set an order of priority, gathering further knowledge where it is needed. The fourth is to test those hypotheses against various materials, and to revise or drop them where they fail. The last is to draw implications: to put the result of the tested hypotheses in order, and to pass it on in a document or in a conversation that others can use. The sequence can look fussy; in working life, many people already move through something like it.

Defining the problem is also setting the purpose of the work: what, at root, is being resolved, and what, in the end, is to be achieved. Questions should be neither too wide nor too narrow; a balance has to fit the character of the problem. It also matters who the decision-maker is, and how the decision is made. A great deal of modern business is communication and negotiation among people with different interests, so solving a problem often means talking with, and persuading, the people who bear on the decision. The range of the work, and of possible remedies, should be clear in advance; if it is not, people may pass responsibility or talk past one another, and the work can stall. Time and money, which follow naturally once a range is set, should be taken into account so that the range of remedies stays at a fitting level.

A framework in right measure, and two familiar ones

A framework is the essential, basic structure of an object or of a whole problem. It helps a person take in an overview and the related points, and so offers a structure for working a complex problem. Karl Weick, described here as a specialist in the theory of organisations, held that a framework needs three things in appropriate measure: universality, accuracy, and simplicity.

The first of the two theories then introduced is five forces, a frame for reading the main factors in an industry, and for seeing a firm’s opportunities and risks. In that theory, customers (buyers) and firms (suppliers) are basic marks of how competitive a market is; to those are added whether substitutes exist, and firms newly entering the market; and rivalry among firms already in the market is also a factor. Seeing those five, a firm can set a fitting strategy.

The second is SWOT analysis, which sorts what has to be considered in running a firm, and in setting a path for survival, into four: strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses belong to how the firm is run and managed, as inner traits; opportunities and threats belong to the firm’s place in the market, as outer ones. A firm that sees the four clearly can, in this telling, draw a strategy that helps it compete. The two frames are left as they are named. No separate company case is built around them here.

A pen, a painter, and ideas already in the world

Thinking comes from people, and training it to be orderly and logical is a way to find a remedy when trouble comes, and to make a better choice in more than one situation. In business, the habit is said to raise the quality and the efficiency of work, and to help a team and a company, which is why many firms invest in it for their staff. As the setting changes quickly, uncertainty about survival grows, and innovative tools and services become important for growth, creativity and strategic thinking are asked to work together. People often imagine creativity as making something from nothing; historically, that has not been how it happens.

Picasso is quoted as saying that a good artist copies and a great artist steals, as a way of holding that something wholly new, without a ground in what already exists, does not appear. He is described as combining traits of Matisse’s painting and of African sculpture, so that a new style was born from elements already at hand. The same pattern is then read in products often praised as new, such as Apple’s smartphones and tablets. Duggan, a professor at Columbia Business School, is cited as saying that Apple and Microsoft did not invent what had never existed, but found and combined ideas already in the world, and as introducing, in that work of combination, the idea of strategic intuition: a person’s intuition, enough knowledge and experience in the field, and a habit of forming strategy in more than one situation, acting on one another so that a new idea, or a way through a hard problem, can appear. When strategic thinking and creativity sit together in the right measure, firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Airbnb are named as having come to lead a market.

Why the five steps, and the two frames, are kept together

A question with the right width, a frame that is universal enough, accurate enough, and simple enough, and a habit of combining what is already in the world, are the working parts here. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Essay on the idea of strategic thinking and on framework theory (Korean source page).
2. Jang Jae-yeong, “Why a zero-gravity pen that cost 1.2 million dollars is worth less than a pencil,” Dong-A, no. 121, 2013, as a reference for the discussion of strategic thinking. Sakai Jo, Everything You Need to Know about Business Thinking Methods in One Volume, Knowledge Space, 2012, cited beside Weick’s three measures.
3. Michael Porter and others, A Management Strategy that Raises Core Competence through Differentiation, Harvard Business Review series, 2015, cited beside five forces. Cho Il-hyeong, SWOT Analysis, Modibooks, 2019.
4. Kim In-su, “Matisse and Picasso, Apple and Samsung Electronics,” Maeil Business Newspaper, 7 September 2012. Kang Ho-byeong, “Apple invented nothing… it only found and combined,” 18 June 2010. Duggan, a professor at Columbia Business School, as cited on finding and combining existing ideas, and on strategic intuition.

Last updated: 14 November 2026