
Strategizing and
Un-Strategizing
Designed for Volatility
The era of predictable implementation of strategic plans is gone. Organizational strategy, when conceptualized as a plan for reaching a set of goals, is often no sooner inked than it is out of date. In fact, a staggering 60-90% of organizational strategies are never fully launched. Blame an uneasy geopolitical landscape, the polycrisis, and whatever combination of local and national upheaval is going on, for this volatility. Even the day-to-day life of organizations—staff turnover, high workloads, low engagement—can make strategies much more difficult to create and implement.
Sometimes this uncertainty calls for un-strategizing, which we describe as a deliberate act of unflinching learning, and deep listening with no immediate intent to create a strategy. When strategic planning is required, our mantra is that it should come with big doses of imagination. It should also be “easy, feasible, and effective.” Explore some of the ways in which we do this below.
"Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."
— Gloria Steinem
How can we help?
Facilitated Imagination
Anyone can stare off into space and let their imaginations roam. But let us help you use more structured imagination techniques and workshops to create the kind of strategies that have real zing and open up hitherto unimagined possibilities.
Strategy Lite
We use gamification along with GenAI for speeding up and improving the research and ideation process, to get widespread participation that doesn’t take up a lot of people’s time. When live facilitation is required, we pick from our extensive reflective dialogue toolbox to make the discussions so dynamic and efficient that time simply flies by.
Fixed and Flexible Components
We help groups identify what aspects of the strategy are fixed and what are flexible. For example, for some organizations the desired outcomes may be relatively fixed and the methods to get there flexible, whereas others may be more flexible with the outcomes, while adhering closely to certain approaches.