Background: Universities face challenges in the current dynamic higher education sector. As a result, university managers have to contend with finding ways that will help increase revenue to enable adequate provision of the core services covering teaching and learning, research and publishing, community engagement and promotion of beneficial partnerships. This calls for developing strategic plans by employing strategic thinking skills. The University of Zambia has not been meeting the targets in all its previous strategic plans in the period 2008-2022 as expected. The aim of this paper is to characterise strategic thinking with a view of rendering an explanatory understanding of strategic planning actors in the University of Zambia from their point of view. Methods: This paper is part of a larger qualitative case study which examined the applicability of strategic thinking at the University of Zambia from a sample of 175 participants. However, 26 strategic planning actors were enlisted as participants for this qualitative paper using criterion i type of sampling.

The purpose of this study was to establish the use of strategic thinking variables in a public university, the University of Zambia. Nine constructs of strategic thinking variables in this study are framed as strategic thinking general, thinking in time, intently focused, systems perspective, intelligent opportunism, hypothesis-driven, reframing, reflecting, and environmental analysis. A qualitative research design encompassing a review of documents and archival records, direct observation, and sense-making informed the evidence gathered in this study. The pre-strategic thinking phase covers the period 1966 to 1993, while the nascent strategic thinking phase covers the period 1994 to 2012 and the evolutionary strategic thinking phase covers the period 2013 to 2022. The findings of this study have revealed that in the pre-strategic thinking phase, the University was guided by the national development agenda for human capital development. The absence of an Institutional strategic plan and associated strategy documents points to a disconnection between optimal strategy and the strategic intentions of the University managers. In both the nascent strategic thinking phase and the evolutionary phase, significant gaps exist in the utilization of strategic thinking variables thinking in time, reframing, reflecting, environmental analysis, focused intent, and intelligent opportunism. This study suggests the University of Zambia should engage employees in the use of strategic thinking variables, with a view to increasing the chances of organizational success. Further, it seems possible that the hitherto limited use of strategic thinking as a practice in the University of Zambia may be hindering the achievement of organizational set goals. Through this conceptualization, this paper has attempted to fill a gap in strategic thinking literature as it pertains to public universities