I was recommended The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists by Richard Rumelt, in advance of embarking on a strategy exercise, given the ‘Strategy Foundry’ methodology set out in the book.

The core the premise is that strategy should not start with goal-setting and should instead diagnose a small number of crucial challenges and design coherent actions to overcome them. The rationale for this approach is twofold. Firstly, that most of the time you do not have a single goal but a bundle of ambitions that may conflict and cannot all be satisfied at once. Forging a sense of purpose out of this bundle is the problem most strategy processes fail to solve. Secondly, that strategy is a form of problem-solving and you cannot solve a problem that you have not understood.

For a Strategy Foundry to work it needs an external facilitator, the executive team present, the CEO and Board to be fully engaged, a willingness to abandon existing strategy slides, at least two fully uninterrupted days, an off-site environment (with no operational interruptions), and agreement that truth matters more than harmony and that diagnosis comes before solutions. Before the workshop the facilitator conducts individual confidential interviews for 90 minutes with each participant asking:

• What’s working?
• What’s failing?
• What feels stuck?
• What are the real constraints?
• What do you actually worry about?

These are based on written answers to a few key prompts that participants have privately provided before the interview. These are then synthesised by the facilitator, with anonymous themes extracted and contradictions highlighted (not resolved yet).

Day one of the Foundry is designed to look at what’s changed, why previous initiatives succeeded or failed, and to test a number of challenges, looking at why it matters, why it’s hard and hasn’t already been solved and what it’s caused by. Each challenge or problem is broken down until it is actionable. Day two then converts diagnosis into action, making assumptions explicit along the way and stress-testing potential projects, until the group commits to support the chosen direction.

This was a fascinating read and it’s a methodology I’d definitely like to explore further.