Strategic Thinking for Everyone Specialization

You can’t always know what’s coming, but you can imagine it. You have the ability to embrace new ideas and stay hopeful about the future. That’s what futures thinking is all about. By exiting your default frame and asking the right questions, you can start to imagine new scenarios and use those to inform your decisions. For anyone trying to think ahead and act strategically, this kind of thinking is a must.

With the expertise of Dr. Timiebi Aganaba from the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Futures Thinking course will put the tools, knowledge and strategies for imagining possible futures directly into your hands. You’ll learn the fundamentals and get acquainted with your futures thinking toolkit. Then, you’ll directly apply them in hands-on scenarios. Relying on your usual framework will not produce every possible future. Instead, you need to open your mind and remain hopeful. You also need to learn which questions to ask. By the end of your process, you should be able to exit your usual frame of mind and imagine new scenarios that you can plan for — skills that anyone can learn and apply anywhere. Jump-start your futures thinking journey today!

Information is key to every decision and every strategic move you make. But ensuring you have the right information takes work. Don’t look in every direction for an answer, and don’t force the solution you’re looking for. Instead, you can use a hypothesis and test it with data until the data fits the situation you’re looking at.

With the expertise of Dr. Timiebi Aganaba from the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Information Gathering and Vetting course will put the tools, knowledge and strategies for high-quality research directly into your hands. You’ll learn the fundamentals and get acquainted with your research toolkit. Then, you’ll directly apply them in hands-on scenarios. Data collection is not about using every source you come across. It’s about finding relevant information after testing multiple points of view — in other words, vetting your information. You will need to test data against your assumptions and dig for the insights you can share — skills that anyone can learn and apply anywhere. Jump-start your research journey today!

You can plan what you want to accomplish, but other people will always be a factor. Planning for the actions of others can’t be taken lightly. You need to understand what people want, but you also need to have your influence on the conversation. Ultimately, you can use this knowledge to plan for each scenario.

With the expertise of Dr. Timiebi Aganaba from the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Perspective-Taking course will put the tools, knowledge and strategies of strategic conversation directly into your hands. You’ll learn the fundamentals and get acquainted with your influencing toolkit. Then, you’ll directly apply them in hands-on scenarios. Perspective-taking has much to do with hearing people out to understand what motivates them. When you understand this, you can start to recognize the logic they use in their own actions. As you recognize and model your strategies according to your own goals, you can also establish influence in conversations. By doing all this, you learn to understand the other party, determine what their strategy is and approach them with what you want in a clear way — all skills that anyone can learn and apply anywhere. Jump-start your perspective-taking journey today!