Group strategic thinking may create more value by enabling a proactive and creative dialogue, where individuals gain other people's perspectives on critical and complex issues.
It includes finding and developing a strategic foresight capacity for an organization, by exploring all possible organizational futures, and challenging conventional thinking to foster decision making today.
[6][16] General Andre Beaufre wrote in 1963 that strategic thinking "is a mental process, at once abstract and rational, which must be capable of synthesizing both psychological and material data.
Graetz's model holds that the role of strategic thinking is "to seek innovation and imagine new and very different futures that may lead the company to redefine its core strategies and even its industry".
Within such systems, seemingly trivial actions can produce unexpected outcomes or be magnified by intricate relationship networks, resulting in entirely unpredictable consequences [27][28][29] To address this context, Terra and Passador[27] advocate for strategic thinking capable of: (1) reconnecting phenomena across different levels and disciplines and treating them holistically; (2) addressing objects of study subjected to recursive causality; (3) understanding facts through their dynamics; (4) approaching problems through mappings and negative approaches; (5) integrating non-empirical elements; and (6) incorporating a new mathematical rationale to navigate the non-linearity of such systems and the continuous transition between certainty and uncertainty inherent in their dynamics.
In this type of study, methods such as scheme construction, phenomenological approaches based on deductions and metaphors [30][27] and integrative frameworks [31][32] have been employed to understand the dynamics of various organizational problems by assimilating concepts common to several fields of science.