Strategic Thinking and Planning – CPE

Program Overview

Good strategic plans depend on the quality of thinking behind them. This programme first develops the mental habits of strategic thinkers: taking a long-term and systemic view, questioning assumptions, recognising patterns and weak signals, reasoning from hypotheses and avoiding cognitive biases that distort judgement. It then channels that thinking into a disciplined planning process, using tools such as scenario planning, the strategy choice cascade, critical uncertainty matrices and assumption-based planning. Participants practise on realistic dilemmas faced by Gulf organisations, such as economic diversification, technology disruption and changing customer expectations, and learn to present strategic recommendations persuasively.

Learning Outcomes

• ✓Identify common cognitive biases in strategic decisions and apply debiasing techniques such as pre-mortems and red teaming.
• ✓Detect weak signals and trends and assess their potential strategic impact.
• ✓Build a two-axis scenario matrix based on critical uncertainties and derive strategic implications.
• ✓Frame a strategic issue as testable hypotheses and design the analysis to confirm or reject them.
• ✓Translate strategic insights into a prioritised plan with explicit assumptions and trigger points for review.

Target Audience

• Managers moving from operational to strategic roles
• Strategy, planning and policy analysts
• Finance and business partners supporting leadership decisions
• Department heads contributing to corporate planning

Detailed Program Modules

Training Methodology

Applied Project & Assessment