the strategic thinker

Yesterday, over lunch, I decided to poll my lunch attendees for their opinion towards whether strategic thinking is a skill that could be taught. Without a doubt, everybody nodded that it was a skill that could be learnt, but needs to be nurtured by someone else to develop the skill.

To me, it's not a skill that could be taught, and is just another way of saying how intelligent you are in bigger game of enemies and environment, until this key statement was made that "you may be strategic, but you may not be always right". That really made me think about all the different competencies in the world, and why certain competencies are given the bias of being one where mastery is expected and taken for granted.

For example, if one's competency is "cooking", the societal norm accepts that one may not necessarily be good. However, if one's competency is "strategic thinking/planning", the societal norm expects that one is good at strategic thinking/planning. It may be argued that there are various levels of competencies, for example, amateur, pro, expert, but assuming the highest level, the bias is still present.

When our political leaders assume positions requiring "strategic thinking" competency, I can just imagine what "courses" they will have to attend to build up this competency if they are lacking in judgement accuracy. I am also assuming that some other higher up management will be thinking that the heart, attitude and passion for the job cannot be taught whereas "strategic thinking" can be taught.

With this scenario of lacking in judgement accuracy as a by product of "strategic thinking" going more wrong than right, shouldn't we then also assess the strategic thinker competency with "judgement"? However, judgement isn't a competency, or shall I rephrase, that nobody really teach you how to judge other than a law degree? It's dangerous to also ignore the "strategic thinking" competency and just go after someone with a high "judgement" competency.

(There are many lawyers in our cabinet as well.)

Another conversation I had yesterday was also on the high number of scholars in our defence ministries and its stat boards, sucking away talent from all other industries (like IT for non defence-related industries, or transport, or healthcare). And we can't answer why there are many ex-military in our cabinet? I am sure they are kidding. If all president scholars join SAF, and president scholars are what the country needs, then naturally they will end up in the cabinet, in a matter of time, so it's a no brainer why there are so many ex-military at the top.

Is it desirable? To me, no. It's a clear imbalance of talent distribution that is detrimental to the overall growth of the nation.

And for that matter, those who distribute the cream of the crop talents to the military, shouldn't be expecting the other industries to produce similar talents at same rate as the military, because there will be insufficient talent seeds at the management level to grow any talents.

Therefore, the cabinet will still continue to have a large proportion of ex-military personnel, who are the strategic thinkers, bright, intelligent, no doubt about that, but may not have been in an environment to test their judgement because they spend their whole life doing table top exercises.