The Department of OB & HRM at ECKM in Lahti: Rethinking the Metaskill of Strategic Thinking in Contemporary Contexts

Associate Professor of the Department of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of Business, HSE University, PhD in Psychology  Konstantin Amiranovich Bagrationi , together with his doctoral student and lecturer of the department  Olga Aleksandrovna Tunkevicius , delivered a paper entitled  “Rethinking Strategic Thinking Through the Lens of Strategic Coherence”  at the  26th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM)  in Lahti, Finland.

The paper was based on the results of a bibliometric analysis of academic publications from 1962 to 2024, selected from the Scopus database using the keyword “strategic thinking”. On this basis, a conceptual reconstruction of the notion of strategic thinking was conducted.

The presentation prompted an extensive scholarly discussion, during which participants reached the conclusion that it is methodologically unsound to reduce strategic thinking to planning and to conceptualise it without regard to its psychological dimensions. The development of strategic thinking among managers at all organisational levels contributes to the formation of a shared understanding of strategic objectives across the organisation — strategic coherence — which represents a critical dynamic capability enabling organisational adaptation in conditions of continuous change.

The conclusions articulated by conference participants regarding the inadmissibility of reducing strategic thinking to planning reflect a broader contemporary trend: chief executive officers increasingly demonstrate a decline in creativity and strategic capacity, shifting their focus towards operational efficiency and short-term performance outcomes. This tendency was also noted in an article for RBC Pro by Professors of Practice of the Department, Stanislav Vyacheslavovich Kiselev and Valentin Vitalievich Timakov (https://pro.rbc.ru/demo/674d70ca9a79476f810e6f7a).