If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.

In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer. Advice to do this is both often given and taken. Yet this advice skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: thinking about your own thinking.

When it came to recommending a course of action, almost everyone chose the first one they thought of.

This is predictable. Most people, most of the time, solve problems by grabbing the first solution that pops into their heads—the first insight. In a large number of situations this is reasonable. It is the efficient way to get through life. We simply don’t have the time, energy, or mental space to do a full and complete analysis of every issue we face.