Strategy Off-Site Facilitation

The Challenge:

Leadership teams regularly regroup on strategy -often annually- to determine directions and align a roadmap and budget for the following year. You are likely to do that too. You may have your preferred facilitator, and settled into a routine of those annual exercises. You set a BHAG (Big Hairy Ambitious Goal) as a target state of the business and work backwards to a plan. And for the next 12 months, you will likely lament that you cannot execute the plan and give adequate focus to the strategy. Eventually, the strategy is worthless because you are effectively reacting to the changing landscape and firefighting the survival of your business. Does that sound like the way strategy turns out in your business? 

It is not surprising, strategic approaches are still guided by mass production management paradigms and power plays, which still prevail in MBA education. The world has changed, however, in the past 20 years. Digital has brought globalisation, and Computer Clouds have enabled flexible scaling. Small startups can compete with major corporations very rapidly, creating a landscape for disruption. In such a landscape, opportunities are plenty for the smart players, and risks are continually emergent for the incumbents. It calls for agility, starting with refreshing your approach to strategy using us.

Expected Outcomes: 

The strategy off-sites bring collaboration across a leadership team at the C-suite or Business Unit levels or across a change initiative. They offer a starting baseline from a refreshed perspective. We highly recommend combining this offering with our Continuous Strategy Operating Model. 

From the off-site, you can expect: 

• Alignment of your team on the strategy direction with ownership and leadership, 

• A realistic strategy that mixes the ambitions and the resolution of the real constraints of your business (else, your strategy is only ever going to be wishful), 

• A tight-congruent lineage from ambitions to execution, with measures at all levels, 

• A starting point of execution and a realistic view of the load as the people that deliver the strategy are generally the same that attend to the BAU,

• A clear direction, yet the flexibility to adapt, change and pivot periodically as the landscape unfolds, 

• Something congruent that you can equally present to the broader teams and your investors and that will withstand scrutiny and challenge.  

Our Differentiated Approach:

Our approach to strategy off-site differs from the classic approaches to strategy, in line with complexity thinking, digital challenges and the need for agility: 

• Organising a broader collaboration enables more voices to be heard so the constraints surface and are addressed. After all, a strategy that does not address constraints is, at best, wishful!! 

• The participatory nature of the workshops also allows alignment to be built into the process. The strategy no longer needs repeating by the Executives like a broken record; everybody is on board, everybody owns it, 

• Though we identify strategic vectors for directions, we anchor the strategy into the present. This allows you to root strategy in reality and give it a starting point,

• The lineage of strategy is mapped in a deployment tool from ambitions, break-through objectives, strategies and execution, with measures at all levels. The tool enables a high level of coherence, which is necessary in strategy, 

• Rather than focus so much on the endpoint, we focus on the starting point of the strategy. The high-level execution is mapped to the teams that will own them, spotting bottlenecks immediately and collaboration needs. 

• You get it; how we do strategy in a fast-changing landscape is totally different from classic approaches. It needs to start in the present, follow vectors and offer affordance for change along the journey.

Service Format:

This service is typically short and sharp. We engage with your team in preparation and run an intense two to three days off-site at your premises or a venue of your choice. 

We recommend much wall space as we use copiously "analogue" whiteboards, flipcharts & post-it notes in favour of people-generative collaboration. 

Our typical workshop follows Agendashift IdOO pattern for strategy and concludes by organising it into an xMatrix. The format can vary with up-front assessments, further deep-diving into inside-out/outside-in considerations, the production of Wardley Maps of your business during or after the workshop, and support to create subsequent communication to teams and investors. 

Organising your leadership team for a few days is expensive, and we ensure that this time is maximised for efficiency.