Stabilise first
Before you change anything: what must not slip in the meantime? Protecting what works is an action too.
We facilitate strategy processes that start from your reality: the tensions that hold you back, and the landscape you can actually move. So strategy becomes action on Monday – not a plan that ages in a drawer.
Most strategy processes begin with a picture of where you want to be in three years and work backwards from there. In a stable world, that works fine. But in a world that keeps moving, the plan ages faster than it can be executed.
At the same time, many strategies stall for reasons that aren't in the plan: misaligned expectations, competing agendas and dilemmas nobody quite says out loud. And many leadership teams spend a surprising share of their energy pushing on things that won't move.
We turn it around. We start from your reality as it is and ask a more useful question: What can we meaningfully move – from here? The point isn't to lower the ambition. It's to put the energy where it can make a difference.
A strategy rarely stalls because the plan is bad. It stalls in the tensions nobody quite says out loud.
For many years we have facilitated strategy processes on the same principle as our Team Acceleration: we start with the tensions instead of planning our way around them.
We work from the leadership's own experience of reality. Where do you disagree without saying so? Which expectations are not aligned? What holds you back – and how do you yourselves help create it? Once the tensions are said out loud and given a shared language, they can be worked through. Then they become energy instead of resistance.
Some tensions cannot be solved, only balanced: running the business and developing it, control and autonomy, pace and quality. Here we work with polarities. It helps you out of the false either/or debate and towards getting the best of both sides.
Read more about Team Acceleration.
Not everything in a strategy is uncertain. Some things need a plan, some need expertise, and some can only be understood by trying things out.
An important part of our advice is helping you tell the difference. For this we use the Cynefin framework, developed by Dave Snowden. It distinguishes between situations where cause and effect are obvious or can be analysed, and complex situations where they only become clear once you act.
Where you need analysis and a solid plan, you should have one. Where the situation is complex, you need small experiments and fast learning rather than a plan that pretends the future can be predicted.
Where the river meets the sea, the sandbanks shift with every tide. The cliffs do not move, however hard the water pushes.
An organisation is a landscape of the same kind: processes, systems, governance, habits, roles, relationships and the stories you tell about yourselves. Some of it is sand and can move this quarter. Some of it is cliff that no amount of leadership energy will move this year. And some of it can only be seen at low tide.
Estuarine Mapping was developed by Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Company, front runners in working with complexity. Together we map the forces shaping your situation and place them according to two questions: How much energy does it cost to change? And how long before anything actually moves?
Our partner Morten Bruhn Højsgaard is trained in the method by The Cynefin Company and receives ongoing supervision from Beth Smith of The Cynefin Company.
Before you change anything: what must not slip in the meantime? Protecting what works is an action too.
A portfolio of small, safe-to-fail moves rather than one big programme. Each move is small enough that being wrong is cheap.
If something can't be moved directly, change the conditions around it so it can be moved in six months. Often this is where the real lift lies.
Decide in advance what you will watch, and which signal should prompt you to act. The map is a living instrument.
We own the process. You own the content.
As external facilitators, we have no ties to internal dynamics or political agendas. We run the process so you can spend your energy on the decisions. We ask questions that don't point to a particular answer, and we hold back from concluding too early.
At the same time, we are leadership and development consultants, not only process facilitators. Many of the forces that slow a strategy down live in habits, loyalties and assumptions between people. We have an eye for them, and we create a space where they can be said out loud.
A strategy only becomes reality if the leadership team also upgrades the way it senses, thinks, collaborates and acts together. That is the core of re:lead's Upgrade Circle. Read more on How we work.
We talk about where you are, what is pressing, and what it will take. Write to info@relead.dk.
Together we frame the question the process will work on. A good question is concrete, time-bound and doesn't point to a particular answer.
Before we meet, we gather perspectives from those who know the landscape: through conversations, stories and questions like "what keeps you awake at night?".
In facilitated sessions, the leadership works with the tensions, polarities or forces in play. We choose the method to fit the task and build challenge into the process, so your picture gets tested.
You decide on a handful of concrete moves with names attached and agree on what you will watch.
The landscape shifts as you act in it. We return at a regular cadence and offer sparring to leadership, so the strategy keeps fitting reality.
You see both what carries your strategy and what holds it back – and you share a language for what can be moved.
What can't be moved this year is said out loud and set aside. That frees attention for what can.
A short list of moves with owners, rather than a long list of initiatives nobody owns.
Small, safe-to-fail moves give answers in weeks rather than quarters, and the answers can be used right away.
It is a good fit when:
Which approach fits you, we work out together in the first conversation.
Write or call us, and we'll have a no-obligation conversation about your situation and find the approach that fits you.