Strategic Thinking Playbook, Step by Step for 2027

Help a leadership team think together about a hard strategic problem and leave the room with a clear choice, through seven workshop plays on framing, systems, futures and trade-offs.

Who it's for

Leadership teams, senior managers, consultants and anyone who facilitates strategy work. It does not teach analysis tools; it teaches a team of four to eight people how to think together about a hard strategic problem, with each play designed as a two- to three-hour workshop.

What you'll learn

• Reframe a problem from five angles (time horizon, customer, the goal behind the goal, life without the main constraint and an outsider's view) and agree one strategic question
• Map the system behind a problem that keeps coming back with causal loop diagrams from system dynamics (Jay Forrester, Peter Senge) and the iceberg model
• Find where to intervene with a simplified ladder of leverage after Donella Meadows, and decide what to stop
• Build four plausible futures from two critical uncertainties, in the scenario planning tradition developed at Shell by Pierre Wack and colleagues, each with signposts to watch
• Wind-tunnel your options across the four scenarios to separate robust options, bets and hedges, and pick the no-regret moves
• Run a pre-mortem, the technique devised by Gary Klein, and agree kill criteria before you commit
• Write a strategy kernel of diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent actions (Richard Rumelt), check the balance across the three horizons (Baghai, Coley and White) and agree a stop-doing list

What's inside

• 44 pages, 7 plays
• Every play sets out its objective, when to use it and when not to, the time, people and materials it needs, numbered steps, a diagram, a ready-to-use template, an illustrative example from a fictional UK organisation and common mistakes to avoid
• One template per play: Strategic Question Reframer, Causal Loop Worksheet, Leverage Point Finder, Scenario Matrix and Driving Forces List, Options–Scenarios Robustness Grid and Signpost Tracker, Strategy Pre-Mortem Sheet, and Strategy Kernel and Stop-Doing List
• A closing action plan, Your Eight-Week Strategic Thinking Programme, with a one-page checklist that fits all seven plays into four workshops over eight weeks
• PDF in A4 format — read on screen or print
• Instant download after purchase

Contents

1. Reframe the Strategic Question
2. Map the System Behind the Problem
3. Find the Leverage Points
4. Build Four Plausible Futures
5. Wind-Tunnel Your Options
6. Run a Strategy Pre-Mortem
7. Make the Trade-offs Explicit

Part of The Business Library

This playbook is one of the 55 ebooks in The Business Library, available together for £109 (worth £1,437 if bought separately: the total of the individual prices of the included titles in our store). It is also included in The Ultimate Business Bundle, which adds 8 checklists and toolkits and 10 workbooks — all 73 products for £147.