Strategy that survives contact with reality
Strategy is for the pursuit of viability and advantage. Most of what passes for it is theatre: a document for the board and a story for the outside world.
We help senior leaders read the reality they are standing in and conceive a strategy they can execute from there.
You have probably seen this strategy before
A vision at the top that could belong to any organisation on Earth. A purpose statement nobody can pin to what the business does. A row of pillars generic enough to swap between sectors. Values at the base. It goes up on the wall, and nothing changes.
It happens because strategy has been captured by two demands. Governance, which wants a document to file. Projection, which wants a story for the outside world. Both are met by the annual artefact. Neither is what strategy is for.
The result is a familiar one. Busy organisations that are stuck, reacting to events rather than shaping them, with a strategy their own people do not recognise and cannot act on.
THE PROBLEM
WHAT IS STRATEGY FOR
Viability and advantage
Viability
The organisation's ability to keep adapting to its environment and survive. It is as much structural as strategic: autonomy in the parts, cohesion in the whole, and the capacity to adapt as fast as the environment moves.
Strategy is not a document or an annual event. It is the ongoing act of orientation: how an organisation continuously interprets, adapts and acts within its environment.
Advantage
The organisation's capacity to shape its environment, expand its options, and maintain its position over time. Advantage is relational. It only exists in relation to the terrain you operate in and the other actors who occupy it.
Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Where leaders rethink how strategy works in the real world.
Conversations with senior leaders, strategists, and practitioners who have experience in executing strategy in a volatile and unpredictable world.
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