A strategy workshop · Devin Fidler
Use this workshop to examine how emerging forces could change the way your organization creates value, coordinates work, and participates in its wider environment. Bring those possibilities into contact with a real strategic issue, then identify responses worth pursuing.
Before you begin
The guide is intended for leaders in innovation, technology, strategy, and planning, and for others helping their organizations navigate the changing territory ahead. It combines foresight deep-dives with participant deliberation, building toward strategic options and practical next steps.
Choose a consequential issue broad enough to invite fresh thinking and specific enough to support choices. It might concern a changing customer need, a source of advantage, a capability to develop, or a way of organizing work. Agree what participants can decide during the workshop, what they can recommend, and who will authorize subsequent action.
Include people who see the organization from different positions, particularly those close to customers, operations, technology, and strategy. Appoint an internal facilitator or presenter to prepare the briefings and guide the discussion, and someone to capture the useful findings. Use small groups where they help people contribute.
Select a few hypotheses and examples for each of the three themes below. Add dated observations from your own sector and from unfamiliar places. Include evidence that complicates the argument. Invite participants to bring a development they find consequential and an assumption behind the current strategy.
The suggested schedule runs from 9:00 to 5:00 on day one and 9:00 to 12:30 on day two. Adjust the emphasis and activities to the group’s needs. An exploration horizon beyond the current planning cycle can help people reconsider familiar arrangements; the resulting actions can begin much sooner.
Introduce the forces, explore their implications, and develop possible responses. The times below are a starting point; leave enough room for participants to make the ideas relevant to their own situation.
Keep a shared record of the assumptions, implications, and options as they emerge. Each session should give the next one something useful to work with.
Use the second morning to examine the proposed responses more closely, make promising ideas concrete, and agree how the work will continue.
Capture how the group’s understanding of the strategic issue changed, the assumptions that deserve further examination, and the options worth pursuing. Preserve the reasoning behind the choices, including important differences of view.
For the next steps, identify an owner, a first action, any resources or approval needed, and when the group will reconsider the result. An experiment should clarify something that matters to a decision. A watching brief should identify what change would prompt action.
Agree where the findings belong in the organization’s existing planning and resource decisions. Some proposals may be ready to pursue; others may need research, a stakeholder conversation, or a limited trial. The workshop should make those distinctions easier to see.
Arrange the first follow-up before participants leave. Circulate a concise record afterward and invite corrections. At the review, examine what has been learned and what should continue, change, or stop.
Content for the briefings
Select the arguments most relevant to the strategic issue. Use a few revealing examples, explain the mechanism each might reveal, and leave time for participants to question its significance. The prompts below are invitations to inquiry.
Foresight deep dive
Begin with the company as a coordination technology: an arrangement for bringing people, resources, and decisions together. Explore how changing coordination capabilities could alter organizational boundaries and the ways value is created. Connect this to the organization’s inherited understanding of its situation. A company can see a development coming while remaining organized around the conditions it will disrupt.
Discuss which arrangements are essential to the value being created and which reflect yesterday’s constraints. Examine what an unfamiliar competitor might assemble differently. Ask which assumptions would need to change before the organization could respond.
Foresight deep dive
Explore artificial agency as the ability to initiate and coordinate activity. Follow a real undertaking from discovering a need through organizing contributions, checking results, and learning from the response. Consider how human expertise, software, and outside services could be combined. Treat collective judgment as something that can be designed, including how ideas are challenged and decisions made.
Discuss what could change in the coordination of work before any individual task is automated. Examine where judgment, authority, and accountability reside. Follow a proposed change from an affected person’s perspective, including the relationships and support that a formal workflow may overlook.
Foresight deep dive
Examine which capabilities could become easier to obtain or reproduce, and what might remain scarce. Advantage could move toward customer access, trusted relationships, data, permissions, or control of important interfaces. Extend the inquiry to platform dependence, livelihoods, and the institutional arrangements that make a market workable. Consider who gains from a change and who absorbs its costs.
Discuss what happens around a capability as it becomes commoditized. Follow consequences beyond the company. Consider how a proposed arrangement could replenish the skills, trust, and participation on which it depends, and what limits or recourse might be needed.
Facilitation & follow-through
Allow people to reflect before the full group settles on an interpretation. Use individual writing, pairs, small groups, or open discussion as appropriate. Invite different perspectives and ask people to explain the evidence and assumptions behind their views. Keep meaningful disagreement in the record.
After a briefing, ask what the force could change, how that change would reach the organization, and which decisions depend on it. Follow both opportunities and difficulties. A simple shared map can connect developments to consequences, affected people, and possible responses. Return to the map as the conversation develops.
Explore contrasting conditions such as widely available capabilities, concentrated platform power, or uneven adoption. These are possible starting points, not a prescribed scenario set. Use the same strategic issue and time horizon across the futures, and give each both opportunities and constraints. Prepare short starting descriptions beforehand if that would help the group.
Test the same options against those conditions, including continuing the current approach. Ask where an option would be useful, what it depends on, and how it might need to change. Keep the conditions consistent while testing. The purpose is to reveal assumptions and improve choices.
Invite participants to sketch how a proposed initiative would work. A process map, storyboard, mock meeting, or service walkthrough may be enough to expose an unclear handoff, a missing decision, or an assumption about someone’s behavior. Use what emerges to suggest a small experiment or a focused piece of research.
Select next steps for their strategic relevance and the uncertainty they could resolve. Agree who will act, what evidence would change the proposal, and when the result will return to a decision-maker. Continue scouting for developments that challenge the organization’s working assumptions. Foresight becomes part of strategy when those findings can change what happens next.
Material behind the guide
The content draws on the Future Companies hypotheses, the Agentic Everything presentation, and Devin Fidler’s Foresight defined as a component of Strategic Management. The linked hypothesis labels above are shortened reading pointers. Hypotheses 79–87 offer further material on scouting, scenarios, and prototyping.
For optional facilitation methods, see the Government Office for Science’s policy stress-testing guidance and Liberating Structures’ 1-2-4-All. This guide adapts the underlying approaches to a shorter workshop.