Making Strategy Adoption-Ready

Thursday 6 October 2022 

Time:        10:00 - 16:30 

Cost:        £300 + VAT

Presenters: Mike Baxter, Director, Goal Atlas 

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN IN PERSON EVENT AT WOBURN HOUSE IN LONDON 

A structured approach to the work that needs to be done on strategy in preparation for the strategy planning cycle.

Of all the jobs across the strategy lifecycle, making the transition from strategy to strategic plan is one of the hardest and the one that can do most to dilute the impact of a perfectly good strategy.  Making strategy ‘adoption-ready’ ensures that all those involved in the strategy planning cycle are informed and prepared for the strategic conversations to come and guided by clear, time-based strategic priorities.

For a strategy to be adoption-ready it needs to have clear and explicit executive intentions that can be delegated and responded to by front-line teams. This means that strategy needs to be interpreted into time-based goals that, together, will bring about the intended strategic change.

This one-day, hands-on workshop looks at the work that needs to be done on strategy in preparation for the strategy planning cycle. It comprises three key activities, essential to making strategy adoption-ready:

1. How to analyse and interpret strategy (or validate a new strategy in the late stages of its development);
2. How to facilitate commitment by executive leadership teams to time-based strategic goals – this involves capacity-planning (how much change is too much for your organisation?), prioritisation (which strategic initiatives have the highest priority?) and dependency mapping (what dependencies are there between strategic initiatives?);
3. How to enable front-line teams to prepare constructive but practical responses to those goals.

To inform and contextualise these key activities, the course will explore core principles in strategy management, including:

1. Understanding strategy adoption and why it is important;
2. The core conundrum of strategy – how a strategy can be visionary enough to be meaningful, comprehensive enough to be impactful and yet focused enough to be actionable year-on-year;
3. The need for strict separation of strategy from strategic planning to safeguard strategic resilience;
4. The importance of strategy boundaries – why strategy needs to be distinguished from business as usual.

Since this workshop is all about translating executive intent into front-line action, it is suitable for everyone from senior executives (e.g. members of senior leadership teams) to managers of front-line teams (e.g. directors of professional services or heads of schools).

Facilitated by Dr Mike Baxter, from GoalAtlas.com, this workshop will draw on his own experience as a leader in higher education, his 20 years of strategy consultancy and his recent benchmarking research on university strategies to facilitate a practical, structured, evidence-based approach to making strategy adoption-ready. 

Mike is an industry expert, government advisor, keynote speaker, author, professor and former university Dean. He has been a business consultant since 2001 for some of the world’s biggest brands (e.g. Cisco, Google, HSBC, Lilly, Skype, Sony PlayStation) and has amassed over 10,000+ hours of independent consultancy offering unbiased guidance and advice to organisations in all sectors, including technology, higher education, finance and pharma.