about
Strategy is Making the Hard Choices About Which Path Will Deliver
To produce the unimaginable takes both courage and the hard choices between what to focus on and what to put aside or postpone. Making those choices is difficult --and it's rarely done well without an outside expert to provide an approach and the facilitation that pushes you to think even better. We offer strategic planning and all of the associated services to ensure you deliver unprecedented results.
Strategic
Planning
Our typical strategic planning retreat takes place over 3 full days and includes significant pre-work. The component activities include crafting a future-based vision, scenario planning, the Merlin Process™ of goal-setting, strategy mapping and assignment of key initiative ownership.
Guerrilla
Strategy
If you are challenged by a wicked problem, and your internal team has hit a wall, Guerrilla Strategy is the answer. It’s a 2-3 hour in-depth attack on your most urgent challenge. The most efficient path to acceleration.
Culture
and Core Values Alignment
These are custom programs that usually include a preliminary culture survey and analysis, and a workshop to design both ontological/ethical and strategic core values, and the key behaviors and practices that correspond to them. A main deliverable of these programs is a scorecard to utilize as part of the performance management system.
Strategic
Interventions
These are 2-3 day interventions with significant preliminary interviewing designed to attack a significant obstacle and craft a strategy to accomplish the goal it is impeding.
Custom
Programs
These are programs designed to address specific needs of our clients. Please schedule a call if you believe your project requires this approach.
concepts
Helping Startups Achieve A Strategic Advantage
Running a venture-funded start-up is different than running a typical organization. Because of the unusual demand for faster-than-normal growth, start-up founders, leaders and employees must be able to solve problems quickly, adjust behavior seamlessly, and generate new frames of reference on the fly. With the advantage of a strong and testable strategy, decisions are guided by the future rather than by instinct or bias. The strategy provides a guardrail against which you can true-up your decisions.
Culture
Culture is the fabric that weaves together your organization. It needs to be optimized for exactly your goals and your strategy. In a strong culture employee retention stays high and everyone behaves in ways that drive results. We can help assess your culture and drive the changes to optimize it.
Goal Setting
The quantified vision is the starting point for the Merlin™ Process. Strategic goals should come from the future, not from past performance. Bridging that gap, between now and the vision’s fulfilment requires time travel. So, we travel with you, to the future, and take a page from Merlin the Magician’s book –walking backwards to the horizon of the strategy. Those numbers become the strategic goals.
Visioning
You certainly have a clear vision of the future you are creating. But is it specific enough to be quantified? If not, we’d like to help you clarify it. A measurable vision is the best source of truly strategic goals. That’s why we developed our proprietary Visioneer™ process.
Strategy
Strategy is the plan to accomplish the very toughest goals on the way to your vision. It’s not a set of projects or budgets (although it leads to those). It is an explicit, testable, measurable plan based on your best data and thinking. As experts on strategic planning, execution, and measurement, we can facilitate your team’s strategic planning and ensure it lives in every corner of the organization.