Strategic Conversations Bootcamp

Foster Whole System Strategic Thinking, Planning, and Leading

A lack of strategic thinking and planning in organizations is costly. The greatest expense is the investment of time and resources into activities that do not support company goals or the mission. In addition, employees show up, do their work, and go home. This results in missed opportunities. Without a context for their work, employees are not inspired to think or plan creatively about process improvement, innovation, or cost savings. And anyone who has tried knows, it can be a struggle to get teams to buy-in to strategic goals, much less think and work in alignment with those goals.

Developing your leadership ability for strategic thinking and planning, coupled with the skills to engage in strategic conversations significantly improves your value as a leader. The days of hiring an outside agency to create a strategic plan for your organization are over; so too should be strategic plans developed at the top and handed down for others to implement. Organizations poised for growth and success have leaders who are adopting strategic thinking as an on-going way of doing business and strategic planning that engages employees across the whole organization as well as external stakeholders. They engage everyone in developing agile plans, cycles of experimentation and learning, innovation, and measuring actions against relevant metrics.

Strategic Conversations Bootcamp will teach you how to use the SOAR Framework to support strategic conversations at all levels of an organization; deepen your understanding of the value of scaling strategic conversations to include the whole system; explore the Appreciative Inquiry 5-D Cycle, Design Thinking, World Café, and Open Space Technology.

Strategic Conversation Bootcamp Learning Outcomes:

This training will prepare you to engage your teams in strategic conversations that can:

• Increase productivity, engagements, and organizational effectiveness;
• Reduce costs, misalignment, and conflicts;
• Improve customer service levels;
• Innovate in the face of challenges; and
• Make a positive contribution to the bottom line.

After completing this bootcamp, you will have the tools to engage teams from a whole system perspective in conversations to:

• Address short- and long-term challenges, systems, and innovation;
• Explore strengths, dynamic capabilities, and opportunities;
• Develop or re-evaluate organization’s values, vision, and mission statements;
• Set goals, objectives, strategies, and action plans;
• Clarify roles, relationships, and expectations; and
• Track progress through regular cycles of action learning.