5 Strategy
Facilitation Tools
for Change

2. Think at the Edges of the Box

When guiding others – and yourself – to innovatively think outside of the box, there are two critical elements. First make sure you have clearly defined the challenge being worked on, as a single sentence or paragraph. This could take the form of a ‘How might we’ question – for example, “How might we better meet the changing needs of our customers?” This challenge statement defines the edges of the box – in effect creating a boundary line between the present and future. The known and the unknown. Inside the box and outside of the box.

It is human nature to gravitate to the security of the known. Without consciously realising it, the initial ideas in a group’s strategic brainstorm are quite likely to not be that innovative. More in the box than out of it. Shifting their thinking only slightly towards the edge, while safely not getting too riskily close to the edge. So the second step is to then move people further out onto the edge of their thinking. Guiding and supporting rather than criticising and pushing. Learning that truly out-of-the-box thinking is found at the edges.

3. Evolve Beyond Best Practice

For many leaders ‘best practice’ is the critical benchmark they aspire to. Focusing on implementing what is commonly acknowledged as being the best approach. Problem is, in many cases that results in operating up to a decade behind. By definition, best practice requires evidence that it is in fact considered to be the best. Which requires significant time for it to be implemented in multiple instances, then with further time taken to establish a reliable pattern of longitudinal results. Meanwhile time waits for no one. While best practice is slowly being proven, new – potentially even better – practices are busy emerging.

So do not just aspire to ‘best practice’. Also discover ‘emerging practice’. Where others have proven there is a better approach than your current method, leverage their learnings. While knowing that this is just half the picture. That alongside ‘business as usual’ we also need to innovate and operate ‘business as unusual’. In other words, we are always leading two businesses – the business we are in and the business we are becoming.

4. Experiment Wisely

With age comes wisdom. The more years we have each lived on this planet, the more we have experienced and learnt as a result. Becoming wiser. Better able to make sensible decisions based on likely outcomes. We also become more judgemental. To be wise implies good judgement – while to be judgemental implies bad judgement, or unfair judgement. Expecting someone else’s future to reflect our past. However no matter how old we get, there is one thing we can never experience. The future.

With this in mind when facilitating strategic discussions, highlight that a different frame of reference is needed for making decisions about aspects of the strategy such as new technology and cultural trends. While past experience helps inform future outcomes, it also risks constraining and missing innovation opportunities. Causing strategies and organisations to be disrupted due to outdated assumptions. Instead use the wisdom of past experiences to guide new strategic experiments to better understand the future.

5. Scale Aspiration into Action

Strategy is a plan of action to achieve major aims. A critical factor is that small yet incredibly powerful word – action. Too many teams make the mistake of confusing aspiration with action. While the two words may begin and end the same, at the core they are very different. Aspiration is longer, slower, more wordy. While action just gets on with it.

Our world is filled with too many aspirational mission statements, visionary presentations, creative sticky notes and inspired meeting chats – that lead nowhere new. The phrase ‘paralysis by analysis’ exists for good reason. Accelerate the strategic shift from aspiration to action with… scale. Not SCALE or even Scale. Guide teams to take that first small step. Then another. And another. While realising that stepping is a physical action. So research, meetings and planning alone are not active steps. They are preparation to take that first step. Scaling bold aspirations into action. By stepping forward.