As a facilitator, you sometimes step into a boardroom and before a word is said about strategy, you feel it. Not in what people say. But in what they don't say. A smile that is just a little too tight. A joke that is actually a prick. A silence after a difficult question.
And then the strategic exercise begins. The reason is usually the same: the world is shifting, uncertainty is increasing, and agility must increase. So: focus on strategy.
But what I see remarkably often: strategy does not fail because the analysis is weak. Strategy fails because the management team is not a team at that moment.
The exercise will not be a joint search for direction, but a fight to be right. To protect one's own domain. Not to lose.
Sometimes this is visible, with discussions escalating. More often it is more subtle: political sentences, prudence, compromises that everyone can live with... but that doesn't really warm anyone up.
And that's the problem: strategy requires clear choices. No compromise.
Strategy requires clear choices. No compromise.
As soon as an MT cannot support that choice together, a strategy is created that no one is against, but no one is really in favor of either. And your employees sense that flawlessly. It seeps through in contradictory emphases, shifting priorities, decisions that are "reconsidered" at the first headwind.
And then you get something paradoxical: you want to become more agile, but you become slower. Because every real choice becomes political again.
That's why I often ask a question early in the process that seems to have little to do with content, but everything with success: will you all be able to tell the same story with the same conviction? Not verbatim. But in intention.
Can you defend the same trade-offs? Accept the same consequences? Continue to carry the same choices, even when things get difficult?
If the answer to that is faltering, then the problem is not "the strategy". Then the climate.
And that's where a facilitator can make the difference: not to "bring" the strategy, but to make the undercurrent negotiable, to keep tension workable, and to guide the MT to clear choices that they want and dare to carry as a collective.
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