My recent article on creating a “Map of Paris” to help your organization get unstuck generated a lot of positive feedback, including a few inquiries as to how managers can more generally improve their operational thinking.
As I noted, a great deal has been written about strategic thinking, including by yours truly, but strategy alone isn’t enough. You and your team also need to think operationally if you want to see the benefits of that strategy: tactical attention to metrics, incentives, monitoring, and process innovation are what drive performance along the strategic path towards your business goals.
However, many leaders and teams struggle to think operationally—not because they lack the expertise, but because they haven’t aligned operations with the big picture. Too often, I’ve seen managers who are really good at getting stuff done making isolated fixes in their silos or, worse, building operational infrastructure that’s either disconnected from or even in conflict with other parts of the enterprise.
So how can you develop operational thinking as an executive? Here are five things you can try out.
1. Map the System: Understand the Big Picture
The point of that “Map of Paris” exercise is to illustrate that organizations are complex systems, much like cities. Each part—whether it’s a function, a process, or a team—has its own purpose, challenges, and dependencies. Focusing only on your “neighborhood” might mean that you overlook how your domain connects to the larger whole, such that the work you’re doing in your own area unintentionally creates pain points, inefficiencies, and interpersonal friction elsewhere in the organization.
Each person or team in an organization has a different “map” or mental model of how things work, and these maps often don’t sync up. Creating a collective map of your organization’s systems isn’t just enlightening—it can be transformative. Team members quickly see how different their mental maps are and bring the operations of the organization as a whole into focus.
When you and your team understand the big picture, you’ll move from isolated fixes to systemic solutions, delivering results that are both more efficient and better aligned with your strategic goals.
2. Identify the Pain Points: Find the Friction
With the big picture in front of you, focus together on where things aren’t working. What are the pain points? Where’s the friction? Too often, we fail to address the pain points—it’s easier to focus on our own stuff, and we’d rather avoid the conflict that could come with calling out what’s not going well.
Identifying and acting on pain points requires curiosity, collaboration, and courage. One person’s logical process might be another person’s roadblock. Emotions can run high when people start challenging established workflows. One key is to tap into empathy and emotional intelligence. Ask, “Why do my colleagues see things differently than I do? Why is this interface causing pain?” When teams map their processes together, especially across functions, hidden assumptions, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies often rise to the surface.
For example, I recently worked with a team that came to realize that they had completely different views of the end-to-end customer lifecycle. In simple terms, the product development, sales, and customer success teams didn’t see the world the same way. We created a collective flowchart, identified the pain points, and quickly realized that involving key members of each team further upstream would reduce infighting, deliver better products faster, and increase customer happiness. This analysis also helped the teams reduce inefficiencies and costs.
Operational thinking is about having the courage to address areas of friction and work together to create solutions.
3. Think Like an Engineer: Break Problems into Components
Operational thinkers know that you can’t fix everything at once. Instead, they approach challenges like an engineer or scientist would: breaking problems into smaller, manageable components.
In my early days as a traditional management consultant, we were taught to frame the most critical questions that must be answered to come to a recommendation to the client. We identified specific issues and then prosecuted them via hypotheses: statements that we could prove or disprove to get to a clear solution. I could devote a whole article to this topic, but here’s a basic example:
How can we reduce customer churn?
Components of this problem could include issues related to:
- Product
- Pricing
- Customer service
- The market
Taking just the first one, product-related issues, some hypotheses could include:
- Poor product quality
- Poor product performance
- Lack of features
- Difficult implementation
- Clunky user experience
You can see how the original question, “How can we reduce customer churn?” is too broad, leaving room for guesswork, false starts, and perhaps even throwing in the towel and going back to the old way of doing things. Breaking the problem into components helps you get to root causes and make meaningful changes without disrupting the entire system (unless, of course, you discover you need to disrupt the entire system, which can happen!).
4. Test and Iterate: Make Small, Continuous Improvements
Operational thinking isn’t about perfection: it’s about progress. Once you’ve identified a pain point, experiment with small changes to improve it. Test, measure, learn, and refine. Remember that the greatest factor in innovation isn’t big ideas—it’s making continuous adjustments that incrementally reduce dysfunction, sharpen alignment, and improve performance.
For instance, if handoffs between teams are a recurring point of failure, you might pilot a new workflow that focuses on increased communication, clearer roles and responsibilities, and explicit protocols for escalation. Try it out and ask the team to assess how it’s going after a few reps. Did the new workflow improve throughput? Great! Now refine it, expand it, and make it the new way of working. If not, adjust and try again.
Pro tip: the best changes are often identified by the team itself, not the managers. Ask team members what they would change to get better results. Employees are eager to share their insights and be heard! This empowers the team and often results in surprising improvements.
As with agile development and engineering processes, the key is to build a culture of continuous improvement. Small changes compound over time, leading to big results.
5. Balance Strategy and Operations: Keep the Why in Mind
Operational improvement doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Check every improved process and efficiency gain against your strategy. Without this alignment, even the best-intended improvements can lead to a disconnect down the road between execution and long-term vision. The most effective leaders bridge this gap, ensuring that the what and the how always serve the why.
This balance is critical for both morale and effectiveness. Teams that focus solely on execution without a clear strategic north star risk burning out, working harder and faster but drifting off course. On the flip side, organizations that focus doggedly on high-level strategy without strong operational systems to execute can wind up with ambitious aspirations that remain constantly out of reach.
Consider a company undergoing a digital transformation. If leadership emphasizes automation and cost reduction without tying these changes to the broader goal—say, improving customer experience—the initiative may stall due to internal resistance. Employees might see automation as a threat rather than a tool for enhancing service quality. But when leaders connect operational improvements to a clear strategic why—such as making service faster, more personalized, and more scalable—teams are more engaged, and the improvements drive meaningful progress.
Make operational decisions with purpose. Ask, “How does this process change support our long-term vision? Are we optimizing in a way that brings us closer to our larger goal?” With this mindset, operational excellence becomes a means of accelerating strategy, not a distraction from it.
In Practice: Operational Thinking in Action
I always emphasize to my client teams how important it is to be on the same side of the table, solving the problem together, rather than sitting across from each other, pointing fingers. Operational thinking isn’t about blame—it’s about collaboration, curiosity, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
A great way to make this real is to get out of emails and meetings and into a room with a whiteboard. Map the system, highlight pain points, break down the challenges, and co-design solutions that link operational improvements to big-picture strategy. When teams do this together, they not only fix problems faster, but they also build trust, alignment, and a culture of adaptability.
At the end of the day, operational thinking is about bridging the gap between vision and execution. It’s what turns ambitious strategies into real-world success. So, gather your team, start asking better questions, and rethink how work gets done. The best-run organizations aren’t just those with great strategies—they’re the ones that know how to bring those strategies to life, one operational improvement at a time.
Let me know what you discover along the way—I’d love to hear what works, what doesn’t, and what surprises you!