Strategy Workshops
Benefits
Our strategy workshops are unique. Led by business guru and strategy expert Mike Baxter, they enable you to develop and apply a confident mastery of strategy, embedded into your day-to-day working practices.
- Gain a first-principles understanding of all aspects of strategy;
- Learn how to analyse, interpret and critique strategy in order to develop your own stance on strategy;
- Discover how to present, apply and create strategy in order to ‘do’ strategy well;
- Apply all your learning directly to your own work in order to drive organisational change.
Content & delivery
Our expertise covers all aspects of strategy and strategic planning and we build content to suit your needs. We also offer a comprehensive curriculum of strategy topics that can be used to tackle a specific strategy issue you may have, or be used as a catalyst to transform how your whole organisation undertakes strategy.
We offer flexible delivery styles, from customised executive workshops to scheduled group workshops and self-paced online courses. We can deliver single workshops, or a curriculcum of bespoke workshops, to meet the needs of your organisation.
Workshops are amongst the most valuable strategic tools available to senior leaders. Read more about the case for using workshops in your organisation or contact us to discuss your workshop needs.
Who are these Workshops for?
We believe that strategy is for everone, and that a shared understanding of strategic methods and purpose can underpin strategy success. These workshops are for anyone whose work is touched by strategy:
- Those responsible for creating, delivering, assessing, planning, managing or measuring strategy, e.g. senior leadership, strategists, functional managers, team leaders, analysts, planners…
- Those who need to work with or work alongside strategy, e.g. employees, suppliers, agencies, consultants…
- Those with responsibility for the governance of strategy, e.g. directors, trustees, governors…
- Those teaching or learning about strategy, e.g. lecturers, trainers, students, aspiring strategists and managers…
To help you navigate the curriculum, we have colour-coded the workshops by theme.
Mastering the Essence of Strategy
Develop a practical yet deep understanding of strategy, become more rigorous in your strategic thinking, gain confidence in discussing strategy, and build your capabilities in strategic decision-making and action-planning.
Mastering the Essence of Strategy-for-Everyone
Understand and be able to persuade others of the importance of securing engagement and commitment to strategy across the organisation. Plan how the key processes for doing so would work in your organisation.
Mastering the Essence of Strategy Governance
Analyse and develop systematic proposals on how strategy should be governed in your organisation, both at executive / board level (executive governance) and across the entire organisation (working governance).
Mastering Vision and Mission
Evaluate your vision and mission, compare and contrast them with those of other organisations and then either refine or completely re-write them to ensure they are effectively differentiated yet still rigorously aligned.
Mastering Strategic Agility
Audit strategic agility in your organisation and create a practical action plan to build, track and test strategic agility as it develops and becomes embedded in routine ways of working.
Mastering Leadership of Strategy
Explore different styles of leadership for strategy and resolve your own personal stance on leadership style. Discover what this means for how you effectively manage-up and manage-down in relation to strategy.
Mastering Strategy Scoping
Learn how to scope strategy so that it can be developed in a structured, systematic and unbiased way. Use your specialist knowledge and experience to refine and operationalise aspects relevant to your role.
Mastering Strategy Development
Learn how to develop a strategy for your team / department / function that aligns and drives forward the organisational strategy, adds your own strategic insights and proposes innovative ways to achieve strategic goals.
Mastering Strategy Adoption
Discover how to produce a strategic plan to get your team / departmental / functional strategy adopted by enabling others to refine and operationalise aspects of your strategy, relevant to their roles.
Mastering Strategy Measurement
Acquire a strong working understanding of how strategy is measured, how KPIs should be used and how strategic progress should be reported. Produce your own draft strategy measurement policy.
Mastering Strategy Audit & Validation
Audit an existing strategy (we will provide one for you to work on, if needed) and validate its content for key characteristics of good strategy. This workshop also enables strategy to be validated during its development.
Mastering Executive Governance of Strategy
Define and document the working relationship between senior leaders and those involved in strategy governance to ensure all the necessary provisions are in place for strategy launch, adoption, adaptation and measurement.
Mastering Strategy Risk & Adaptation
Systematically audit strategic risks (covering the likelihood of both harm and opportunity), prioritise the risks you identify and then develop adaptation plans for the highest priority risks.
Mastering Strategy Lifecycle
Explore the concept of strategy lifecycle and construct a strategy timeline for your own organisation, showing key activities, key responsibilities and key outputs / outcomes.
Mastering Strategy Mapping
Discover the key principles of strategy mapping and then apply them to, firstly, the analysis of a written strategy and, secondly, the development and alignment of new elements of that strategy.
Bespoke Workshops
All of our Strategy Master Workshops, facilitated by Mike Baxter, are available to be run in-house for individuals or teams in your organisation. Contact us to discuss the strategy needs of your organisation.
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Thought Leadership
Author of 'The Strategy Manual' and 'Core Values', Goal Atlas founder and Director, Mike Baxter, is a renowned strategy expert, keynote speaker and thought leader. He publishes regular articles on all aspects of strategy and strategic planning and frequently shares his ideas and expertise via the Strategy Distilled newsletter, LinkedIn and other invited presentations.
Free: Models and Templates
We believe strategy is for everyone. To help you DO strategy rather than just think about it, our models, frameworks and templates from 'The Strategy Manual' are released here under Creative Commons License. This means they are free for you to use in your presentations and strategy documentation. Sign up to hear when new models are released.
Mike Baxter's Book: 'The Strategy Manual'
'The Strategy Manual: A step-by-step guide to the transformational change of anything' draws on Mike's many years of expertise to deliver a practical handbook for anyone interested in the creation, management or governance of strategy. Find out more...
"Best management book I've read all year." Clo Willaerts