Unpacking Strategic Thinking: Identifying the Various Types of Thinking for Management and Education

The various crises of recent years demonstrate that even large, long-established companies are increasingly facing major challenges. Managers must look far into the future and anticipate developments in order to align the company accordingly. As a field of strategic management, strategic thinking offers approaches for tackling the future and leveraging it for the benefit of the company. In this article, a semi-structured literature review was used to compile a catalogue of 19 different types of thinking subsumed under the concept of strategic thinking, which are creative, visionary, synthetic, divergent, intuitive, conceptual, systemic, critical, analytic, generative, panoramic, problem-solving, a-rational, non-linear, metaphoric, abstract, polarity, symbolic and innovative thinking. These types of thinking can serve as a basis for future research on leadership development and curriculum development to train strategically acting actors.