Vague answers

I think the term ‘integrated thinking’ is itself vague, trendy and a management buzz-word. All it really means is trying to take everything into account when making a decision. The CIMA definition is:

“Integrated Thinking is a term that refers to the conditions and processes that are conducive to an inclusive process of decision making, management and reporting, based on the connectivity and interdependencies between a range of factors that affect an organization’s ability to create value over time.”

As I said, take everything into account! So, although a company might like to trim its cost of material, this might impinge on quality and hence might be an incorrect decision depending on how the market reacts. Similarly if thinking of opening an overseas branch you need to take into account: foreign customer preferences, labour laws, transport costs, appropriate marketing, finance, profit remittance, import quotas, country stability, shelf life of goods, local consumer laws etc etc.

When dealing with these abstract concepts (often waffle, in my opinion) it is often helpful to explain them by using an example as I have done in the previous paragraph.

Don’t be overwhelmed by SBL: try for practical, common sense responses then support them where possible with theory and models.

The capitals are a convenient structure for the answer. Businesses make use of the capitals so to obtain a comprehensive picture of how the business is doing it can be useful to go through each of the capitals and to say how reporting on each will be of benefit to shareholders.

Other answer structures could work too.