Strategic Thinking & Business JudgmentGrow 25% a year and be best at everything is a wish list. Can you tell it from a strategy?
Thirty items — 11 executive dilemmas, five evidence questions, a multi-select and 13 behavioural statements — measure whether you can choose where to compete, see second-order effects, reason commercially and estimate honestly. Five banded competencies and a 60% pass mark come back with a growth plan.
Every option is something a smart leader has actually done
The dilemmas begin with a leadership team presenting its strategy as a set of ambitions with no trade-offs, and asking what is wrong with it. They move through the quick fix that relieves a symptom against the slower structural change that prevents recurrence, the 10% price cut that will be easily made up in volume, and a six-month forecast from a careful plan when comparable initiatives across the industry took twelve to eighteen. The five evidence questions test whether you know why the well-reasoned bottom-up estimate is usually wrong.
Options are weighted against public strategy and decision-science research: strategy versus goals and operational effectiveness, systems thinking and feedback loops, industry structure, opportunity cost, exploration versus exploitation and the success trap, unit economics and value capture, escalation of commitment, and reference-class forecasting with debiasing for overconfidence and competitor neglect. Each weight has a written rationale. The bank is original AssessAll work using generic public constructs; no consultancy framework or coined vocabulary appears. Behavioural statements are reverse-keyed in part to catch an idealised self-report.
Your 0–100 score is shown against the 60% pass mark, then Strategic Thinking, Systems Thinking, Commercial Acumen, Decision Quality and Data-Informed Judgment are each banded with an interpretation written for senior decisions. The narrative is generated from your own responses and says which competencies your judgement leans on and which it skips. The growth plan is built from the lowest two, and the item review explains all 30 keys, so a leader who backed the price cut can read the margin arithmetic that undoes it.
What you walk away with
Strategic Thinking, Systems Thinking, Commercial Acumen, Decision Quality and Data-Informed Judgment each come back as Emerging, Developing, Strong or Exceptional, with the overall 0–100 score shown against the 60% threshold. The radar reveals whether your judgement is commercially sharp but systemically blind, or the reverse.
Each band carries a coaching paragraph about the calls the competency governs — what Developing on Strategic Thinking accepts as a strategy, what Strong on Data-Informed Judgment does with a confident forecast — written for people who make those calls, not for students of them.
Built from the lowest competencies, the plan proposes specific disciplines: a reference-class check before the next forecast, a trade-off test for the next strategy document, a contribution-margin calculation before the next pricing move. Each is something to apply at the next executive meeting.
The item review shows your choice, the evidence-favoured option and the published rationale for each weight. Senior leaders often disagree with a key or two; the rationale is specific enough to argue with, and the argument is where the development happens.
Inside the report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
One number, one band, and a two-sentence summary of what the band means for you — then the breakdown that explains it.
Band edges at 40, 60 and 80. Each band carries its own coaching interpretation for that competency.
Built for
- General managers, business-unit heads and functional directors moving into enterprise-level decisions
- Senior managers on a succession slate for executive roles
- Founders and CXOs who want an independent read on their strategic judgement
- Boards and CHROs building a strategic-capability baseline across a leadership team
Ambition is not a strategy. Find out whether your judgement knows the difference.
Thirty items in about 32 minutes, then five banded competencies, a pass-mark result and a growth plan the moment you submit.
₹2,999 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
Five senior competencies — Strategic Thinking, Systems Thinking, Commercial Acumen, Decision Quality and Data-Informed Judgment — through 11 executive dilemmas, five evidence questions, a multi-select and 13 behavioural statements. It tests whether you can distinguish a strategy from a list of goals, see second-order consequences, reason about margin and volume, resist escalation of commitment and estimate from what comparable initiatives actually took. It is pitched at general managers, directors and executives.
Each option carries a weight keyed to published strategy and decision-science research, with a written rationale per weight, and the overall score is shown against a 60% pass mark. Formal training helps with the five evidence questions but not with the dilemmas, which are built so that confident, well-argued options are often the weaker ones. Reverse-keyed behavioural statements make an impression-managed self-report read as inconsistent rather than strong.
About 24 to 32 minutes within a 32-minute window. Immediately afterwards you receive a 0–100 score against the pass mark, five banded competencies with executive-level interpretations, a radar, a narrative generated from your own responses, a strengths-and-development summary, a growth plan built from your lowest competencies and a full review of all 30 items with the reasoning behind each weight. Nothing further is needed or sold to unlock the report.
CHROs and boards use the five bands to structure succession conversations and to target development before a promotion rather than after. Individual leaders use the growth plan as a set of disciplines for the next planning cycle and retake after a year to see movement. It is a competency battery with a banded profile, not a readiness verdict, so it is strongest as evidence alongside a leader's actual strategic record.
Yes. The dilemmas are industry-neutral and market-neutral — a strategy document, a price cut, a recurring problem, a forecast — and the research base is international. Leaders in India, Europe, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and North America sit the same 30 items and receive the same report. The diagnostic is priced in INR and USD, and the price on this page is the whole price.
Each battery takes one management capability — delegation, coaching, conflict, influence, decision-making, change — and measures it through situational judgement scored against published evidence, with a competency profile, coaching interpretations and a prioritised growth plan. For the level-by-level readiness verdicts, see Leadership & Management Premium.
See the leadership catalogue →Methodology: Original AssessAll scenarios and items operationalising public, well-established strategy and decision-science constructs: strategy versus goals and operational effectiveness, trade-offs and the activity-system view (Porter, 'What Is Strategy?'; Rumelt, the strategy kernel); systems thinking, feedback loops and second-order effects (Forrester; Senge); industry structure / competitive forces (Porter); opportunity cost and marginal resource allocation; exploration versus exploitation and organisational ambidexterity / the success trap (March; O'Reilly & Tushman); unit economics, margin-versus-volume contribution analysis, and value creation versus value capture (Brandenburger & Stuart; Teece); escalation of commitment (Staw); and reference-class forecasting plus behavioural-strategy debiasing for overconfidence, competitor neglect and groupthink (Kahneman & Tversky; Lovallo & Kahneman; Flyvbjerg). Situational-judgement scoring is literature-keyed with a documented per-option rationale citing the evidence for each weight. Generic public constructs only; no trademarked instrument names or vendor-coined vocabulary, and no items copied or paraphrased from any branded assessment. Flagship items are tagged for optional human SME validation.