Anyone who grew up in the ’90s will surely remember a New York Times bestselling book titled Magic Eye. Within, readers found mind-bending, three-dimensional images that contained a hidden pattern. An image that appeared to be seemingly random shapes and colors might contain a hidden sailboat or a pair of glasses. The trick was to relax your eyes and allow the hidden pattern to reveal itself beneath the surface. In a similar way, the most effective actuaries learn to zoom out from the details and see the larger strategic picture.

Thinking strategically can be a difficult step for many emerging actuaries. A common pitfall is for actuaries to go through the motions of an analysis without taking a step back and asking why. They might flawlessly execute every step enumerated in the procedure manual but struggle to articulate the reason why those steps exist. The way to maximize our influence as trusted advisers is to be able to perform the analysis and then take the next step of influencing our stakeholders (informed by the analysis) to achieve the long-term goals of the enterprise.

So, what do we mean by thinking strategically? Strategy is your game plan. It is the long-term roadmap for how to achieve a particular goal. Tactics, on the other hand, are steps that one takes to execute the plan. While both are critical to success, neither are sufficient on their own. Strategy is not just the domain of senior leadership. Professionals of all levels of seniority have a crucial role to play in advancing an enterprise’s goals. Every decision can be reframed as a strategic act: How you frame a problem, how you allocate your capacity, and how you prioritize your team’s backlog are all strategic choices.

There are a few components of strategy within a business context. The first one is to switch your mindset away from linear thinking and towards thinking in systems. At its core, strategy is problem solving at the process level. Instead of thinking about outcomes as “if A, then B,” start to recognize the complex interactions that occur across teams and functions. A helpful tip is to start with your own role and think about your dependencies. Where does the data come from? How does it get there? Who prepares it? Who audits it for accuracy? Then think about the results of your analysis: Who relies on it for their own decision-making? What processes kick off after I am done? What is the impact to other teams if my analysis contains an error? As you start to take a step back from the nitty-gritty, you can expand your mindset and start to “see the forest for the trees.”

Another component of strategy is taking a long-term view. All of us are busy, which makes it easy to fall into a short-term mindset. But taken to the extreme, this can stifle professional development. Actuaries sit at the intersection of knowledge and relationship-building. If we fail to influence our stakeholders, then it doesn’t matter how good our analysis is. That’s why we need both strong technical skills and the trust of our business partners. Never allow tight deadlines and urgent deliverables to get in the way of developing the skills of tomorrow or cultivating relationships with your stakeholders. Ask yourself where your industry is heading over the next five years. Ask yourself what skills you will need in order to be successful in that future. Ask yourself whether the work product you are delivering today optimizes for immediate needs or contributes to solving a long-term problem for the enterprise.

After we take a long-term view, we can take it to the next level by recognizing patterns. Every organization and industry is cyclical. Human nature influences all of us to fall into predictable patterns. Whether it’s understanding the business cycle or what time a colleague goes to lunch every day, we humans are surprisingly easy to predict. If you can start to develop an understanding of these cycles, then you can work to influence them in ways that lead to positive outcomes. For example, if you recognize that a team under pressure tends to fall into a short-term mindset, realizing that is happening is the first step to breaking the cycle. A great tip for developing this skill is through journaling. Simply taking notes after important meetings, writing down your thoughts about a competitor’s actions in the marketplace, or reflecting on why a project succeeded (or failed) can yield large dividends after accumulating this wealth of information. You might also start making predictions just to test your own understanding. Before a project, write down what obstacles you expect to encounter or predict the outcome of the analysis. Before an important meeting with stakeholders, write down how you think they’ll react. Then afterward, look back on your predictions and reflect on them. Cultivating this intuition will maximize your impact and deepen your understanding of the business.

Another important skill to develop is an understanding of prioritization. While many simply think of prioritization as time management, the truth is that developing an understanding of priority reveals a strategic understanding of the business. Figuring out what is important and why can go far in maximizing a person’s impact. Understanding priority enables an actuary to push back against less important tasks to free up capacity for more meaningful ones. Learning to say “no” can feel dangerous, but in the long run this can lead to positive results for both your team and your business partners. Painful, repetitive tasks can be automated. Difficult processes can be reworked to reduce technical debt and improve the efficiency of the unit as a whole.

The final pillar of strategy is anticipating responses from others. If you can put yourself in your stakeholder’s shoes to understand what they are asking for and why, that makes you better at your role and delivers long-term value to that person. You might even consider a smaller meeting with important stakeholders to ensure alignment before the larger meeting. All of us are busy, but if you can craft your deliverable to precisely meet the needs of the person who will be using your analysis, that is very powerful for both relationship building and meeting key objectives.

In summary, strategy is not reserved for just the C-suite. It is a skill that everyone across the organization should invest in and practice. This article is by no means comprehensive, but some of these mindsets can help to shift your focus and maximize your impact as an actuary. The most influential actuaries aren’t necessarily the smartest ones in the room. Instead, the most influential actuaries are the ones who understand the needs of the organization, have a clear understanding of how each function fits together to make a larger whole, and possess the communication skills to convey these ideas to stakeholders and decision-makers. Like the hidden images in Magic Eye, the strategic picture has always been there. The goal is simply to train yourself to see it. Ff