1. Overview of where to find each skill: Hello and welcome to this course master strategic thinking and problem solving skills in front of you. You have 20 strategic thinking and problem solving skills strategies, and what I've done is divide them into coal categories. These are decision making, conflict resolution, product analysis and strategic thinking. The table in front of you helps you organize these. So in the case off a scenario in which you need to use them, you can always come back and see which of these strategies most apply to you. In addition to the table you also have at the bottom of your sheet each of these strategies in alphabetical order that we're going to cover in this course and these can be seen at the bottom. The remainder of this course will actually go through each of these in each sheet. You will see both the explanation as well as activities that we're going to cover that help you use thes and apply these to your daily life. I look forward to seeing you in the rest of the course as we go through these 2. Crossroads Model: personal decision making is often the most difficult kind of decision making, and I found the crossroads model to be really helpful to think about sort of what road? Ah, we all the the options that we have when we're thinking about decisions, especially long term decisions. What I'm thinking about the beckoning road. It's almost like you're calling your thinking about what you're called to do. The Dream Road is your dream life, the road you need to take in order to reach your dream existence. The sensible road is almost the reality road, the road that is the safest often and is the most practical. When you think he went the road, not travel. That's obviously the most risk. When you're thinking about the kind of road you could take, the options you would have. The familiar road is a linear road. In many ways, it's it's in your comfort zone, and then the road back is sometimes where you need to reevaluate and revisit way you've been before. Now the crossroads model is a very useful way of thinking about the alternatives you can face as you're going forward and thinking about the decisions you need to make to get to your goals. 3. Decision Tree: Welcome to the decision Tree. One of my favorite methods are problem solving and strategy. The decision tree asks you to think about the pathway that each decision could take you and weigh up the pros and cons essentially off each pathway on the left. You actually have an example? This decision is to go on vacation, and so we have three key areas that ah, you could possibly choose. You could go to Europe, you could visit family or you could go camping in state. All right, so let's look at what happens if we go to Europe. Decision to write You could either visit Spain, Germany or Hungary. Now what would the outcomes of that be? You would see new things and have a good time. You would have a great time revisiting sites you've already seen, and you would visit family, save money and have a good time. If you visited family, you could see your parents and visit your in laws. You could spend quality time together and celebrate Mom's birthday, and you wouldn't be on a guilt trip and no need to visit for another year. If you go camping in state, you could go to the redwoods. Or you could go to Johnson Tree. This would be a long drive and spend a night in a beautiful forest. And the closer Dr will allow you to spend more time at this camp site. So these are things that you need to think about and be able to weigh up for yourself. What I've done on the right inside is I've helped you by just creating a mark up off this diagram for yourself. So this would be decision one. He would put the three decisions in here in terms of decision to and then the three sort of pieces that could come out of those. All right, And then finally the outcomes for each piece, and in this way, you would be able to go through this process both for personal decisions and business decisions going forward. 4. Eisenhower Decision Matrix: welcome to this decision. Matrix, which is has bears the name of a former president of the United States Eisenhower. In fact, it's called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. On the left hand side, you will see a matrix that is said to have been developed by Eisenhower during his presidency to categorize tasks and their importance. At the top, we have urgent and not urgent, and on the side we have important and not important. Eisenhower is said to have placed tasks in these quadrants before planning his way forward . Let's talk a little bit about what the meanings of these categories are. If something was urgent and important, in other words, it was in quadrant A. It would be executed immediately and personally. A crisis is a good example of a situation in which eyes and how it would have to execute something immediately and personally if something was not urgent yet important, he would receive an end date on do it personally if something was urgent but not important , he would delegate these tasks to his vice president and other members of his cabinet. And finally, if something fell in the not urgent and not important, he would drop this project? No. I have put together a framework for you to use that will help you manage these tasks. Once you receive a tusk and you place it within these categories, this tool will help you manage these. So, for example, let's say we get three tasks. A crisis is hitting. You have a deadline and you are receiving a monthly update. Okay, When I talk about a deadline, this is a deadline. That is in a matter of hours. Okay, so this is an Audi deadline. So you would put these three tasks in these quadrants. Crisis deadline would go into important and urgent and then receive a monthly update is not urgent. But it is important. No. When you place an X in these columns that will, when you've completed these pieces and it's an actual ah, not a perfect example using crisis as ah task to complete. But once the crisis is averted, you could use put X in this column and it will show you a strike through to show you the tasks that have been completed by you and this will. This sheet is actually formatted to do that for all your tasks. and you can do that right across. Now, the irony of having this urgent on not urgent and not important in here is because, technically, those tasks should not be dealt with by you. So this is just for show to show you that this framework captures all of this. So, to recap, when tackling a decision, you need to think about two key components. Urgency and importance. Using our Eisenhower's model. Think about where they fall on the quadrant and then plan accordingly. I look forward to hearing about how you have used this model in your work. 5. John Whitmore Model: welcome to the John Whitmore model. John Whitmore is famous for coming up with the grow model, where it talks about how to set a goal. We have gold reality options and will, in other words, what do you want? Where you now what could you do and what will you do? What he's also done. And what I've tried to sort of synthesize is when you set a goal for yourself to ask specific questions and determine the criteria as to whether it's been met or not. So I've developed this sort of excel table and us specific questions about your goal. Once you have it, Um, and if the criteria is met, you can put a one in the school and you can determine how much of your goal actually reaches all of these sort of criteria. Okay. And as you insert into this, you will notice that the document will actually update. Now, if you ah, far from no criteria will actually go read, because I've put in a conditional formatting that anything below 50% will be read anything about 50% will be yellow and anything above 70%. In other words, between 50 and 69 will be yellow, and anything above that will be green. Anything in the green means that you have set yourself a good goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timeframe. In other words, smart. It's also a pure, positively stated, understood, relevant ethical and then clear challenging legal environmentally sound agreed on recorded . I encourage you to use both the grow model as well as this criteria when thinking about your goals and the decisions you need to make. 6. Pros and Cons: perhaps one of the most popular methods of looking at a problem using the pros and cons myth. It, um this is perhaps something that, you know we learned in in school about how, toe way up certain pros and cons of a situation. I've put together this table this very, very quick table that will help you list out the pros and cons of a situation that you might be faced with. I've also thought about different ways to frame these situations. In other words, advantages, facts compared to disadvantages and opinions, this can sometimes be helpful when we're trying to differentiate between a pro and a con. We could ask ourselves what are the advantages of this process or the disadvantages we could also think about? What are the facts of this situation and what are the opinions in relation to the situation ? This is a very quick method to use and might be very, very helpful to do as an individual and sometimes in a team will you collaborate around the pros and cons of a specific project 7. Randomize and Sort: a very useful tool. In fact, I face the situation when I was planning my wedding and I needed a way to randomize the order in which I certain people came in to the celebration. And so I thought this would be a good tool to share with you because it might be useful for other situations where we call this is the randomize and sort method. So what we do is the steps that we have. The first thing I've done is I've put the name in the order of the people. These are the people that I needed to to sort, and I didn't want to play favorites, right? And so I needed to find a way to order them. So what I did was in the column next to the name right. So, in underneath order, I typed in equals to rand or random, depending on the kind of excel that you're using. And I just close the parenthesis and press enter and what you'll find is that a random number is produced and what I do in step two, I actually dragged this number down. So as you will notice, Excel just produces a random number Okay. What I do then is I highlight this range, so I'm going to start over here and highlight this range. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to data. I'm going to click sort Range. I'm going to say that the data has a hetero and I'm going to sort this by the order. In other words, this heading right here. And I could sort that from smallest to largest or largest to smallest. I'm gonna just click, sort. And what you will notice is not James at the top. Tiny a second Janet is Third, Provision fourth and Sam's fifth. And so this is a way in which I've randomized and have sort this list, and you can do this with hundreds of people. If you need to produce a random order for a lottery or for all kinds of purposes, this kind of method could be very helpful to you. One caveat is the minute you change any of these cells. So, for example, if I type something down here, that side type the the number two, these numbers will change. And so when you're randomize ing and sorting, make sure that you do it once and don't make any changes because you order may change as well. Thank you for looking for listening to this lecture. And please remember to give me a review If you're enjoying this course. 8. Rubber band model: one of my favorite models to think about when I'm making a huge Korea decision, for example, is the rubber band model. The rubber band model asks two questions. What is holding you and what is pulling you? And this is mostly I come to these decisions when I'm thinking about two good decisions to decisions that are not to contrast ing. 1 may seem good in some areas and others might be good in in another area. And so what I have to do is think about where I am and another option that might arise. So in other words, where I am is what is holding me and where I may go is what is pulling me. And so what I've done here is provide you with a result a table that will help you get to that, and you rank thes 1 to 5, one being least important and five being most important. What is holding me is pay, which is three out of five. I have long hours, which is also three out of five. It's close to my family. The current location of the job is close to my family, and, um, it allows me Although my I was a little bit long, It allows me time to spend with my family. And so I sum this and I get 15. Then if I look at what is pulling me, my current job is very boring. I have promotion activity opportunities at this new job. I have less stress. Notice how I've given this four stress levels are really important to me and my health and finally, location. It's a bit further away, and so I come to 12 and I have 15. And so the decision that I came to was that I should stay in my job. But I need to reevaluate in the medium term and think about maybe if I should re negotiate my hours and think about maybe my family location, something like that. Had the hours shift a little bit, I might have been closer to going to the new job. So this is a really helpful way off of sort of looking at two alternatives