"To be strategic, first be creative, then be analytical. Since strategic thinking deals with the future, you will have very little quality data available to you, and starting with analysis would be a mistake.
The more strategic the issue you face, the less data there will be. Which is why you should keep your powder dry, and use whatever data there is to validate or kill ideas, not to generate them. An additional benefit to this approach is that the dataset you need to test an idea is much smaller than the dataset you need to generate an idea.
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So ‘Down’ [Moi ici: Na figura acima] is about diving from a great height into the world of data to identify the likelihood that an idea you’ve already had will be successful or not. Not uncommonly, data will prove sparse, unreliable and contradictory. Unsurprisingly, you might feel at that moment that you’re further away from Completion than at any point since the start of the project.
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The Helicopter of Creative Discovery is brilliant at tackling the future. The future can’t be analysed, it can only be created. Generating many creative options with limited data is what many people naturally do when they envisage future holidays or entrepreneurial ventures. This takes no time. The vertical way is exciting, light and free. The rest of the time is dedicated to slowly maturing the options, through discussion and reflection, until reaching an answer that feels right. The Helicopter approach, however, is too reliant on subjective matters of personal taste to be entirely convincing in a business context."[Moi ici: É preciso massacrar as opções criativas iniciais com dados obtidos de pequenos testes iniciais que rapidamente validarão ou rejeitarão hipóteses]
Trechos retirados de “How to be Strategic” de Fred Pelard.