Strategy work often suffers from a disconnect between the boardroom and the frontline. Our research on strategy, “Minding the Gap,” explores how organisations engage with strategy in an increasingly unpredictable world. We examine the reality—rather than the theory—of how strategies evolve and how people participate in shaping the future of their organisations.
Key Findings
- The Strategy-Purpose Loop: Purpose is no longer a perfunctory part of the process; it frames strategy, which in turn shapes purpose. Stakeholders now demand authenticity, seeking a “lived” strategy rather than just an “espoused” one.
- The Locus of Focus: Where leaders place their attention matters. Productive strategy requires a balance between internal capabilities and external contexts, as well as between immediate delivery and long-term horizons.
- Strategy as Dancing: Rather than a static plan, strategy should be experienced as a “live” process. It requires leaders to be conscious of the pace they set and to involve a wider range of stakeholders early in the thinking process.
- Beyond the Mechanical: Many strategy processes are experienced as “painful and passive.” To be effective, strategy must tap into collective energy and creativity, moving from a series of “disconnected nouns” to a continuous, meaningful “verb”.
Methodology
This research involved 20 in-depth conversations with senior leaders across the private, public, and third sectors. We explored their first-hand experiences, the language they use, and the mental models they hold when “strategising”.
Recommendations
- Revisit founding stories. The original ethos and principles of an organisation often act as a touchstone for everything you do. Reframing them in a modern-day context and being explicit about what’s changed creates a link to the past, and grounds you in the present.
- Ask what does ‘strategy’ need to achieve in your organisation right now. Rather than defaulting to existing underpinning and historical metaphors.
- Connect strategy work to purpose in the broadest sense. Attend to any misalignments if you want a strategy people will care about. It’s fine if you are on a process of discovering your purpose but be authentic in doing so.
- Identify a ‘north star’. Articulate an overall direction that everyone will recognise at an intuitive and literal level. This needs to be both clear and memorable enough so that a shorthand phrase for it emerges in the organisation.
- Design the user experience of strategy. Create conditions for spontaneity, creativity and reflection as well as analysis through the process. Be really thoughtful about who makes choices, how they are made and when you need to convene people.
- Involve widely and early in the process. Be thoughtful about who is involved – a diversity of perspectives is essential to the quality of thinking. Make sure you get a good balance of time and attention on internal and external perspectives, as well as on the present and future.
- Think iterations and loops right from the start. Continuous and explicit cycles of thinking with stakeholders and staff create opportunities to keep refining and learning on an ongoing basis rather than a one-off ‘launch’.
- Take ‘the gap’ seriously. Conversations about purpose and strategy with stakeholders and staff must include space for their ideas on how to close the gap between current reality and the aspiration.
Interested in Metalogue’s approach to participative strategy? Find out more here.
