Courses

This course will explore the assertion that the time is ripe to rethink how organizations approach strategy. As commonly practiced, strategic planning and implementation are too often slow, inefficient, reactive, and backward-looking processes. What if an organization could more quickly perceive and respond to changes in the environment? What if strategy was viewed not as a fixed, episodic function owned by a few within an organization, but rather as an adaptive, continuous activity, with every employee helping to move the organization toward a preferred future?

In this workshop, we’ll begin by exploring our commonly held beliefs and assumptions about organizational strategy. We’ll then learn how to seek “inspiration from the edges”—that is, how to identify newly emerging products, services, and behaviors (through a practice known as signal gathering) that serve as harbingers of the future. We’ll develop structures that promote ongoing strategic conversations inside an organization, and that translate conversations into action to keep an organization moving continuously toward its strategic intent. Participants will leave the workshop with new structures, a framework to promote everyday strategy, and a plan for how they can apply this new way of thinking about strategy to their own organizations.