FinPod

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of What's New at CFI. My name is Meeyeon You've seen and heard me here before many times. I'm a VP of Content and Training here at CFI and also your host for all of CFI's podcasts. Today I'm joined by Timothy Tiryaki co-author of our newest course called Strategic Problem Solving. Now we live in a world today that's defined ⁓ kind of ironically by constant change.

whether it's the acceleration of AI, new software coming out, shifting markets, and just general increasing complexity in everything that we seem to do. And with that comes this cost of problem solving, and it becomes higher and higher because we seem to often be solving the wrong problem. Yet many teams still react to service level KPI shifts without really stepping back to ask a more fundamental question of,

What is the problem? Are we solving the right one? And in this episode, we'll talk about the thinking approach behind our core strategic problem solving, including the double diamond model, the balance between divergent and convergent thinking, and why strong strategists spend more time defining problems before jumping to solutions. So if you regularly face decisions where what you do next matters and matters deeply, this conversation is going to give you a preview

of the mindset and tools that'll help you and what's built into our course. So welcome, Tim.

Timothy Tiryaki (01:31)
Hello, Mian, it's great to be here, thank you.

Meeyeon (01:33)
I'm so excited to have you here. And I'm really excited to dive into why strategic thinking is, it feels harder today. ⁓ You described today's environment as one of constant flux and as someone that lives in it can't agree more. Why do you think, ⁓ why does that make disciplined problem solving more important than ever?

Timothy Tiryaki (01:57)
Well, let me take a step back and talk about flux for a moment, because flux, it's while the word itself has a meaning, it's also an acronym I created a couple of years ago to explain this era we're going through. And a lot of us are familiar with the term VUCA that we live in a VUCA world now. Now, that term, I'm not sure if you knew, do you know, for example, when that that term was coined by the way? Yeah, it was in the 1990s, actually, some leadership researchers.

Meeyeon (02:19)
No, I'd love to hear more though.

Timothy Tiryaki (02:24)
coined the term for the upcoming 21st century that they're expecting a massive change with technology and that we're moving from this more predictable, reliable, linear realm where forecasts were more accurate and easier to have projections and market research to a VUCA world, which means the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous terrain. So VUCA is an acronym that explained the 21st century and how the dynamics

are out there and nowadays we're living VUCA on a daily basis, right? That's VUCA is our life and we understand very well. Yet the interesting thing about that acronym and everyone's talking about VUCA leadership, VUCA like strategy and VUCA leadership and VUCA, et cetera, but we're kind of past the VUCA era in terms of not that it's over, we're in this like super VUCA era, VUCA plus, and we need to coin that in a different way because VUCA

explains that we're in this volatile, uncertain, et cetera, terrain. But how do we approach it? Like, how do we deal with it? So I proposed in the strategy realm and literature, which seems to be taking off, the idea of flux as an acronym that we are in a flux era. It's like VUCA plus. And the idea is that what's expected from organizations, from leaders, and the new way of approaching this terrain is that we're in a fast environment. F stands for fast. L is for liquid.

U is for uncharted and X is for experiential. Just a nutshell that we're all expected to be thinking and acting fast and it has some pros and cons. When you rush, right? Rush decisions, rushed actions can have consequences. So how do we act both fast yet wise? Fast but still with the right amount of strategic thinking coming in. And then the liquid, the liquidity is that it's hard to come up with concrete.

or solid ways of working on strategy or finance that we need to have this ultra-adaptable approach, this liquid approach. And even in organizations, it's harder to frame departments, divisions, units like we used to. So there's this liquidity, even in organizational design, there's liquidity in strategy, strategic objectives, there's liquidity in the financial modeling that needs to be done. And the view that this is uncharted territories in this post-AI, post-pandemic realm.

Like no one has the ultimate answers. You go to the best consult, the big three, five, seven, whichever you want to call them, they don't have the answers. They're trying to figure out. So we're in this uncharted territories. No one can give advice. And all of us have the opportunity to upskill ourselves, to think and act more strategically, which connects the last one, the experiential aspect that we're in this realm while we're acting fast, liquid and uncharted. We need to have this agile.

rapid thinking, rapid prototyping, rapid piloting, experiential mindset. And that's how you deal with complexity. And that's what strategic problem solving it's all about. It's that differentiation that we're not talking about the day-to-day classic problems, the easy to solve problems, but we're talking about complex problems that actually have consequences. And that's why strategic problems are different than regular problems. I think I kind of went a bit ahead and answered a bit more on the course itself.

Meeyeon (05:39)
Yeah,

but like everything that you described makes it very clear to me why discipline problem solving is not only more important than ever, but is more kind of difficult than ever because, you know, businesses and organizations, governments, I want to, I would say, you know, in the 1990s were considerably less, you know, globalized than they are today. And that makes inherently every decision much more difficult to assess what the true impacts are.

⁓ I think several organizations, whether they are private corporations or governments, feel a lot of immense pressure to act quickly. There are, you know, we are all so connected these days, you know, and that's an overused phrase, but to be able to have a device that everyone has, you know, an iPhone, Samsung, Android, whatever it is, in your pocket and you're connected at all times to the internet. So you feel very...

You feel a lot of pressure to be able to solve problems quickly, to react quickly. But the hidden cost of rushing to solutions before fully understanding that problem, that cost also seems to be higher than ever. But what do you think is the hidden cost of solving problems very quickly, being reactive and putting out fires, so to speak?

Timothy Tiryaki (07:02)
Yeah, and because the pace has accelerated so much, the complexity has accelerated, and we're dealing with so many problems. And at one point, I want to clarify that these are actually dilemmas. I think problems have solutions. When there's a problem, you bring some linear ways of thinking and analysis, and you solve them. But we're dealing with complexity, and complexity brings dilemmas. Dilemmas are not problems.

Dilemmas have facets, dilemmas have angles you can look at them, which is kind of answering your question in a philosophical way that the problems we're facing these days, they're dilemmas and it's more strategic problems. as we rush solving them, we jump into problem solving mode, we risk solving the wrong problems brilliantly. That's, think, a part of the program as well. The training, I think I mentioned that as well. Like we don't want...

Nobody would want to hear that they solved the problem, but it was the wrong problem, right? So this idea of are we solving the right problem is one of the key foundations of strategic problem solving. It's clearly that intersection of problem solving and strategic thinking, right? We have many problems, many levers, but what are the right levers that are actually affecting this?

Meeyeon (08:20)
Yeah, and I had a, in my discussion with Jaren a week ago, I, we were talking about how important it is to identify the right problem. And one of the things that we talked about was, you know, global trade has been very, very volatile for the past couple of years and it continues to be so. and you know, there's examples of a large global corporations that have said, you know, this

Like for example, if we are hit with this tariff, like it's gonna cost us too much. It's just gonna be far too impactful. On our bottom line, we need to move our manufacturing facilities. We're gonna move them from like one part of Asia to another part of Asia, Southeast Asia. And ⁓ they did it. They did it over the past, like guess like year and a half or so. But now that policy, that trade policy has changed and they're thinking, my God.

⁓ we, we made like the wrong decision, but what Jaren was saying was super interesting to me is that, you know, if you just take a step back for a second there, ⁓ the problem is not the actual tariff itself and its impact on your operations, but the problem was very much so how do we make our business less dependent on this so that whatever happens, cause it seems like this variable is influx as you said.

but in a different term, not an acronym, but just fluctuating, ⁓ that problem will not impact us anymore. So I think it's really important to think about.

Timothy Tiryaki (09:59)
Yeah, hence that's why we keep underlining that the importance of defining problem in different levels of problems that requires a lot of systems thinking because at this level, when I look from this level, I see these problems, but the moment you can shift and look again, that's what the example you gave, right? There are actually multiple problems, multiple levels. yeah, sometimes we do have to solve them at the same level. Sometimes based on the discussion, the audience, we tried to go one level up and tackle those problems on. ⁓

Meeyeon (10:05)
Mm-hmm.

Timothy Tiryaki (10:27)
different pieces of the system work. Now, the easy example or kind of the joking example of this problem statement is it's I'm not going to go into the like the country dynamics. It's a bit of a joke in the creative problem solving, strategic problem solving realms, but two different space agencies were trying to solve the same problem. And one defined the problem as how do we create a pen that writes in space, need to have like anti-gravity and how ink flows and this and that and the way they define that.

And another agency defined as how do we have something that writes in space? It doesn't matter whether it's ink based or not, right? So the classic carbon based ⁓ pencil solution is just what solves it. So you just need the pencil and the sharpener. You don't need ink and ink based. Another one spend millions of dollars of creating a vacuum pen with ink and so on. So based on how you ask the question, you might be solving different things. ⁓

But so how can you simplify the problem and how can you tackle something that's a higher level problem? So you kind of resolve things. And that's what we're trying to bring. Because when a financial expert, financial analyst makes an analysis, they notice something. They notice a high cost, a low cost, opportunity to cut cost or spend. Like when you do something one to one, it has an effect on the rest of the system. Like saying that we need to cut down our marketing budget, that's like a

Or the problem is we need to cut down costs, right? That's kind of a lot of companies are thinking about these days. And in the moment you jump to a conclusion, first of all, that is that the right question? Do we really need to cut down costs? Is that the ultimate question? Probably not. There are more holistic ways of framing that. But if that's the question, then jumping to a solution on that, we need to cut down our marketing budget, right? So when you cut down the marketing budget, you're also cutting down potential future sales.

You're also increasing your potential future cost of acquisition. So what happens is when this problem solves as human beings, we are problem solving machines, and especially as adults, it's our way of thinking, right? We love the firefighting. So problems come and we solve them. Yet there's this idea of staying in the problem. And that's where, again, this whole strategic thinking comes in. Let's stay in the problem. Let's understand this as a dilemma. Let's discuss how we can solve this. And there are different problems to solve and tackle. They're interrelated.

And then we can think about the different solutions because the different problems will generate different solutions. It's in a way actually, it's a good starting point for thinking not just strategically but wiser. It's that ability to think critically, discernment, right? And wisdom into the workplace so we understand the consequences of the decisions we're making.

Meeyeon (13:04)
It is interesting because it's so logical, but it's so counter to our culture today. Wherever you're working, the culture is more like, we have all this technology, it should help us do things better, faster. And so to be able to sit with the problem, it seems like a logical and natural thing to do. But everything around us is telling us, that's not it. We have to be solution oriented. But one of the things that will always help

solve any type of problem, think, is a well thought out framework. And in this course, you introduce the double diamond model as the core structure for strategic problem solving. And I just I don't know why, but I love the name the double diamond. ⁓ guess diamonds are girls best friend just for fun. ⁓ But can you explain that model in simple terms for us?

Timothy Tiryaki (13:55)
We all love diamonds, right? Diamond is value, it's wealth, it's abundance of the symbol as well. And yeah, that's a good point, the name double diamond, it doubles down on the value. So the double diamond model, it's an open source model that we customize adapted to strategic problem solving. And the first diamond consists of the problem space and the second diamond consists of the solution space.

Now first, just underlining briefly why that's important that this idea, as you mentioned, our ability to stay in the problem, that's something that requires strategic thinking. And it's not our habit. ⁓ I know for some, might think, wait a minute, isn't that more like pessimist or negative? Like, why do we talk about problems? It's now it's there are positive ways or constructive ways of talking about the problem, right? So I can see some of the ⁓

those that need bit of venting time, they're like, yes, let's talk about the problem. Let's dump all those like, yes, that's I want to talk about everything that's going wrong. Like it's not, ⁓ it's not in spirit of venting or complaining, right? So the idea is that let's look at this problem. there is this ⁓ centered present way of looking at the problem from different angles, right? So what makes a diamond valuable is one of those parameters of the, it's besides like the color and so on. It's the cut.

Meeyeon (14:51)
Haha

Timothy Tiryaki (15:15)
right, the cut and the facets of it. So the idea is that staying in the problem diamond is looking at the diamond from these different angles. ⁓ And that resonate with you?

Meeyeon (15:27)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's very visually powerful for me. Now that I kind of think about it, it just makes so much, it's a very powerful analogy for me.

Timothy Tiryaki (15:40)
That's great, glad to hear. Yes, it is. we've done, we've taught this and brought this into realms from a boards to executives to frontline new leaders. And it always brings a lot of clarity, brings some language, shared ways of tackling problems in a different way and solving these problems. So the second diamond is the solution space. And once we spend time in the problem, then we get to tackle what are some possible solutions.

And in both of these diamonds, the reason why we call the diamond is there's this ⁓ divergent part in the beginning. So where is this opening? And then the second half of it is a convergent closing part. Now, the logic of this is I like using the metaphor of a takeoff and landing of a flight, right? So the divergence is the takeoff gaining elevation and height. So we can see and look at from bird's eye view 10,000.

meters view and so on. And then there's a landing process and we want both of them both. You want to have a smooth takeoff and a smooth landing. So that's a good healthy creative and logical thinking process as well. So the divergent process is a part where you think creative. It's about brainstorming, ideating, where you try to suspend judgment.

Suspend critique critique in terms of that classic. we tried that that wouldn't work here We did that three years like we suspend those it's those brainstorming ideation techniques And then once we have enough options ideas perspectives, then we start bringing back more the logic the constraints the limitations and we start eliminating thinking narrowing and these two are different ways of thinking they don't go well one inside the other the moment you start creating ideas

and narrowing ideas, if you do them simultaneously, you start killing ideas. So the idea is that we want to teach leaders or anyone at all levels to be able to have this mode. Let's stay in this mode for a bit. And it can happen. can even be done in half an hour. It can even be done 20 minutes. 10 minutes, let's just ideate. Let's put on that creative thinking hat, divergent thinking hat on. And then the remaining 10 minutes, let's now narrow. Let's land this plane. Let's think about the best options and decide.

And so doing this discipline both in the problem diamond and the solution diamond is what this is about. So it could be done in 20 minutes. It could be done over six months of a whole product development or even a company strategy.

Meeyeon (18:08)
do you find that, I think, you've explained this ⁓ concept of divergence extremely well to me. It's not something that I've really ever thought about before. I think I've always been, ⁓ I've always been a problem solver. I've been what I think everyone kind of says as, know, solution oriented. People love that phrase. ⁓ But, you know, as I get older, as I have more life experience, I do really appreciate the idea of

thinking about the problem that I'm facing, whether it's at work or in personal life, and ideating on what the problem really is and trying to stay there for, I would say, less than comfortable, less than desirable amount of time before I try to create solutions. And oftentimes, ⁓ it broadens my perspective on what my actual problem is and makes the solution much more easier to land on.

and then kind of like execute that solution. ⁓ I do think though that staying in the divergence, the takeoff part is more difficult for teams than more difficult for most teams. Why do you think teams struggle with that stage?

Timothy Tiryaki (19:26)
So first of all, if you're finding yourself, instead of immediately jumping into problem solving mode, you are starting to learn a bit more that problem, staying in the problem. OK, I'm not going to say you're gaining age or, but you're gaining wisdom for sure. Let's call it wisdom. That helps me with ⁓ the gray hair and gray beard. that's what I hope, at least. Well, the joke aside, the idea.

Meeyeon (19:40)
HAHAHA

Life experience.

Timothy Tiryaki (19:54)
of staying in divergence, actually, it brings a sense of curiosity to understand. And for some people that might find this idea of problem, staying in the problem solving and the divergence of problem. If anyone finds negative, just see it as this is a current state analysis. What you're doing is actually you're showing patience, maturity, wisdom.

to be able to do a better current situation analysis, right? I'm sure the financial analysts are going to like that. Let's understand the current situation. And it is even, it is like an intuitive slash analytical thinking to the current situation. I just wanna stay in the question. That is one of the tactics we bring into the problem divergence. Like just one example of the many, like I like calling it the bat, the bat belt, that the toolkits that we equip people to join. One of them is,

like staying in the question, let's turn the problems that you're noticing and observing into what and how questions. That's one of the techniques and we, it's very simple and it's so such powerful. And what are you curious about this problem? So if it's any, would you feel comfortable sharing maybe a challenge you're tackling this month on your own agenda, anything from personal to work to, I don't know.

Meeyeon (21:12)
Yeah, so one of the things that I am tackling these days is I have a two and a half year old. He's just right at that mark. more than anything, he is like my greatest teacher. I am learning things about myself that I didn't know that I was either good at or maybe could improve at through caring for him. And he's going through this stage.

where he can be quite emotional sometimes. I think he's far less emotional than ⁓ most kind of two-year-olds with, and when I say emotional, mean like temper tantrums. He's not in like a terrible twos phase, but you there's certain times where like he wants to do something and it's not the right time for it. like, you know, it's just, it requires me to be a parent and say, no, you know, we can't draw on the wall at grandma's house.

No, we can't only have milk for lunch, right? ⁓ And my problem is trying to always be very calm, even keeled, compassionate and understanding, but also letting him know, ⁓ like, no, you know, if we can't just have milk for lunch all the time. You can't just eat bread all the time. And my struggle is...

finding a consistent way of always being extremely patient, compassionate, and understanding, but letting him know that unfortunately he cannot always have his way.

Timothy Tiryaki (22:55)
Okay, thank you for sharing. First of all, I just want to claim and acknowledge, right, that this is not a life coaching session and nor is it my expertise. Yet, for me, family is, ⁓ it is within my top values. For me, family is ⁓ one of the key values in life. so, let's take this example as a strategic situation, a strategic challenge dilemma. I'm just going to ask you, can you turn this into a few questions?

Meeyeon (23:04)
Ha ha!

Timothy Tiryaki (23:23)
And I wanted to be sure it's an I question. how do I, what do I, and feel free to just ask a few questions. So what are the questions that you have on this topic? How do I? Three points, what would you say?

Meeyeon (23:37)
I would say.

No, okay, no judgment for anyone. How do I?

Timothy Tiryaki (23:43)
No judgment.

Meeyeon (23:49)
You know, how do I say it? like, how do I say no without feeling bad?

How do I always remain calm, composed, calm and composed even in the face of my son screaming or crying, particularly in a public setting?

Timothy Tiryaki (23:59)
Okay, what else?

Well, I don't know how realistic that is, which is another question is how realistic it is to stay that calm. but it's, it's your question, the, things aside, I just want to showcase, like you actually, from identifying a problem or sharing it's a challenge, a dilemma, turning it into a question automatically, you spend that, that, how you were thinking, like, Hmm, how do I, how do I turn this into a question? Even that was a process of strategically processing this. And instead of.

being in this feeling, were more into a how do I like immediately putting it in? How did you feel putting it into a question format?

Meeyeon (24:59)
I feel like... ⁓

It's much more productive first of all, because if I'm in the situation, it's very difficult to feel like I have the space and time to think about a problem and solve it the way that I would ideally like to. If my son is next to me and he's not having a great time and he's screaming, ⁓ it becomes very difficult to identify and think about the problem because for me, all of a sudden I think,

we need to resolve this, resolve this now, we could deal with the problem later. So just sitting and thinking about the questions allows me to really appreciate that, you the problem is not ⁓ the behavior. The problem is, because the behavior is gonna happen all the time, not all the time, hopefully, but the behavior is a natural thing for a child. The problem is I need a strategy.

to consistently approach that problem when it presents itself.

Timothy Tiryaki (26:07)
And I think what we do in strategic problem solving and what a lot of CFI alum is going to really enjoy is we do bring an analytical perspective to strategic thinking, right? So a lot of the or so-called soft skills, they're perceived as intangible, right? Or too touchy feely for some sometimes. Yet there are ⁓ wise ways to bring or strategic ways to bring those thinking hats.

So this is they're going to notice that we do bring an analytical approach to looking at problems and bringing the strategic thinking into it. And that is a good way of practicing emotion management, right? Instead of approaching to the problems emotionally, how do we like take a step back and kind of bring in some curiosity? It's not mechanic, it's still human. It's just humane ways of tackling the complex situations we face in the workplace.

And we tackled an individual case, the strategic problem solving works even better in teams, right? If someone brings it to the teams realm and we start bringing this mindset and the way we address problems and solution, it brings a lot of productivity as well.

Meeyeon (27:18)
Yeah, and I'm just thinking about our listeners who are very interested in careers, generally in, I would say the most kind of competitive field in finance, which is investment banking. It's a very high stress environment, not in terms of the work. The work is kind of what it is, but I think generally it is that culture, that ⁓ team, the mentality that's in investment banking that makes it so stressful. And I think...

that there are so many practical tools in this course that whether you are a leader of a team at an investment bank or you are kind of just starting out at a junior level that they can apply ⁓ right away. ⁓ is, do you think that you could share maybe one technique from the course that either regardless of whether they are, you know, a third year associate or someone that's just starting out might be able to use in their day to day? ⁓

Because strategic thinking, don't think has to be, strategic thinking is not reserved for the managing director that leads the team and that needs to win business to make the team function. Strategic thinking can be for, it really is for anyone and everyone. And I think that the earlier that you realize and address that your day-to-day, the way that you approach all the assignments that you have, the pitch books that you build strategically, the better you can perform and the more successful you can be.

Timothy Tiryaki (28:44)
And this is a moment for me that I do want to mention clearly that ⁓ two weeks ago, my most recent book came out published by Wiley, Leading with Strategy. And again, that being at the intersection of leadership and strategy, you just tapped on a really important point on that shows up both in my book and in this course as well that ⁓ together with my again, my colleague, co-founder Yerun, Yerun Crime Bank, we advocate that strategy is not just a plan.

that sits in a document and strategy is not just for executives, that being strategic is a human competency capability. And we've been advocating for years that that strategy should be a distributed capability. It's something that we wanna cultivate at all levels of an organization. Anyone can become more strategic. It's not exclusive to leaders and anyone that thinks I have no influence on strategy, why should I care about being strategic?

It is a life skill, I think, in the coming chapter of humanity with AI. Clearly, that classic saying, if you're not replaced by AI, you're definitely going to be replaced by a human that's really good at using AI, an augmented human. And among those augmented humans, some of them will be more strategic and less strategic. So the most strategic augmented humans will be the next era of successful people. So they've got to sharpen their AI skills and their strategy skills.

And it is for everyone. We have further research. I won't get into that, that it's a competency. It's a skill that all of us can develop. You're not born strategic. Some people might have a bit of more advantage on dispositions, but all of us can develop and sharpen that. So yes, it's absolutely a topic that all of us need to dial up on ⁓ being strategic. How can I think strategically and act more strategically at all levels? Does it matter if you have the strategic planning responsibility or not?

So hence this course is one of those great starting points to start bringing more of that into the picture. ⁓ And back to the comment on the tactics, like I do want to, there's a lot of toolkits under each one of these. So divergence, convergence of problem statements and divergence, convergence on the solution. And I do want to leave just with one, because I want people to really practice that, like think about this idea of turning the problems into questions. That's something I want, it is one of the...

Like lessons, we talk about it. Like we talked about that. Let's keep with that. So people, anyone listening to this really practices that just take anything, take a dilemma, challenge problem and write two, three questions on how do I, what do I like do it's just pen and paper pause, give it a try now. And you're going to notice that the moment you can do that, you can ask a question and then don't start solving it. Just sit this idea of sit with the question. Just give yourself a couple of minutes. Just like look out the window.

take a sip of your coffee with that question, how do I? And then you give actually a moment of calm and you'll notice that you'll start coming up with even better ideas afterwards. So without rushing to solve, just stay and sit with it a couple of minutes. I'm not talking about hours. Now, if it's bigger life questions, okay, big life decisions, yes, like contemplate for a few hours at least if not more, but give yourselves that grace, that opportunity to reflect on a topic. And there are several more tools.

This is one of the more communication like coaching tactics. We talk about ⁓ several evaluation frameworks of identifying what problem is the right problem. How do you evaluate different problem statements? How do you narrow them down? How do you evaluate different solution statements? How do you narrow them down? So there's a lot of ⁓ thinking hats we bring, ⁓ different ways of prioritizing and thinking. And so a lot of models from the impact effort matrix like

Is this a high impact topic, low impact topic? Is this a high effort topic or a low effort topic? And quickly, again, we love as analytical thinkers, right? We love our models, our matrices to quickly put into perspective. there's a lot of, it's several tools that I know a lot of analytical thinkers will really enjoy.

Meeyeon (32:54)
And before we wrap up, I'd love to ask you a more personal question. Looking back at your own career so far, when do you think that learning all of the frameworks that you talk about in this course would have made the biggest difference for you?

Timothy Tiryaki (33:11)
Now, again, so for me, I think ⁓ it was both something that resonated with my personality as I do love creativity that over the years I've sharpened the divergent thinking abilities and hence why I teach the divergent thinking in the course as well. ⁓

So for me, the development opportunity was actually on the convergent thinking. love creating, I love looking at things from different angles. I love developing more solutions. Yet some of the ways of narrowing that we bring in this program, I think that would have been much helpful in my last 20 years. It would have helped a lot of bringing reality, right? For me, but it's dependent on the different people because I'm more of a creative person.

whenever it's about the rubber hitting the road, the barriers, limitations, budgets, constraints, ⁓ I would tend to do less of that. So with this course on the convergent thinking side, some of those toolkits remind us of the strategic thinking is not just about future foresight or creativity, that there's also logic coming into the picture. So there's this beautiful tango in this course. Maybe that's a good example as well, right? There is a dance between

we gotta move those few steps forward, few steps backwards. And in that dance, there's a beauty of convergent, divergent thinking, being able to do both, not just one. People usually do have a tendency, they're either better at converging, better at diverging, but I think it's the movement, the ability to do that would have saved so much money, time, effort on software selections, product expansions, market launches, right? Sometimes on some cases, it was a very quick, I love this idea, it's like innovative, let's do it.

because my bias, we didn't take the proper time to think evaluate and right in some other cases, so for me, I have a positive bias towards creativity. ⁓ But this course is bringing that great balance on thinking and anchoring in the reality as well. For somebody else, they're gonna have their different reflections, I'm sure.

Meeyeon (35:17)
Honestly, I can't recommend this course enough for everyone listening, regardless of what stage you are at in your life. I think that this is going to bring a great deal of perspective to every facet of your life. you are climbing the corporate ladder and you need a strategy there or you need something that's more practical and hands-on, this is the course for you, strategic problem solving. And if you are interested in the topic further,

Tim has said that he's got this book, it's out right now, Leading with Strategy. I hope you'll pick up your copy wherever you might get your books. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, I will see you all very soon.