Strategic Thinking
The Vietnam War was a battle that seems to have taught the American Military and Government officials a lot about cooperative working and strategic planning. Each American involved most likely has a different story to tell about the War from the ground soldiers all the way up to President Johnson. However, each participated in a mission driven cooperative work environment with many different thinking styles.
These styles included strategic thinkers, tactical planners, and logisticians to name a few. Each thinking style plays a critical role in the development and progression in an organization like the armed forces in the Vietnam War.
I would describe myself as a strategic thinker. “Strategic thinking focuses on finding and developing unique opportunities to create value by enabling a provocative and creative dialogue among people who can affect a company’s direction. It is the input to strategic planning—good strategic thinking uncovers potential opportunities for creating value and challenges assumptions about a company’s value proposition, so that when the plan is created, it targets these opportunities.
When receiving a task, or order from a physician, I need to be able to fully think out if and when I should perform the order. Sometimes doctors make
mistakes, so if I were too not think everything through, mistakes could occur at times. It is critical that doctors and other nurse cooperate with one another to form the best plan of care for the patient involved. I need doctors to be willing to listen and accept that they may have made a mistake that was caught after a nurse strategically thinks about an order that was given.
If we work as a team and communicate, there is a less likely chance for errors to occur, if the smallest error happens it can have devastating effects on patients, so its important to always think about what you’re doing, before implementing it.
Strategic thinking was extremely important during the Vietnam War. Without planning and strategically thinking the US would of had no chance at ever successfully attacking the enemy. “…Much higher levels of strategic thinking like the use of ‘free fire zones’, which was basically a legal fiction that the US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside to unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling.
This caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in the country side” (Denvir, 2013). Killing the Vietnamese was what the US was planning for, so in order to do that, they strategically thought of a way to effectively do that. Since the US army was to doing well by thinking like this, it opened up the ability for successful heavy firepower and catastrophic attacks.
Strategic thinking can help facilitate success in a verity of different situations. Everything from Nursing to the Military can use this method to help in carrying out daily tasks along with helping in elaborate plans. It can be time consuming or cause over thinking, but more often then not, its aids in a successful result.
