Living Strategy Circles

 

Develop your organization to be as
adaptive as the future requires

Living Strategy Circles

Our Approach

In our work towards broader perspectives and collective development, we also strive to weave development into strategies.

To be able to navigate within the unknown, leaders are now called to embrace agile, relevant, and all-inclusive strategies, that consider life both within and outside of the organisation.

Organisational strategy is encouraged to include relevant contexts to become part of a future that supports all aspects of life, the biosphere, families and more. These organisations will seed the ways for leading and convening, that make a difference. They become part of the solution.

Strategy then is everything that your organisation does, all its interactions, its way of being, which has an effect on the outside world. A good strategy makes this explicit, understandable and actionable for employees and stakeholders. It is alive.

Living Strategy Circles

Our definition of strategy

The Living Strategy process is a holistic, dynamic, self-regulating methodology designed to help leadership teams chart new paradigm-shifting pathways and build purposeful objectives for stakeholders and decision-makers alike.

In just a few days of workshops, leadership teams follow a logical, step-by-step process that begins first, with a deep dive into your own purpose and second, the analysis of the perspectives of relevant stakeholders. In small actionable portions, the organisations products, services, pricing and distribution models are (re-)designed accordingly, so that your organisations business processes and structures can be adapted. With prototypes that do not endanger the overall flow, new ideas can be tested and rolled out when working well.

The Living Strategy will upgrade your C-Level Team’s ability to make your organisation more responsive and relevant in the coming months and years.

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

A reductionist approach to strategy

To:

A holistic inclusion of the complex, multi-stakeholder content of the organisation

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Offering products and services that no longer excite clients or are relevant to stakeholders

To:

Identifying what you and your stakeholders really want to move forward while developing your organisation 

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Mainly crunching numbers to define your strategy without obvious new direction or change

To:

Sharing a new narrative that gives meaning to yourselves, the employees, customers and stakeholders

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Strategic planning developed by a few, articulated to many 

To:

Collective, dynamic, iterative process using the intelligence of the team and the organisation to proto-type and validate the strategy before its agreed and articulated broadly

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Being overly inward focussed strategy process

To:

Aligning your strategy with what is happening around you 

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Being overwhelmed by complexity

To:

Working with complexity in a light and effective way: in simple and doable actions that address major concerns and life situations of the world around you

 

The Living Strategy Shift

From:

Strategy never fully disseminated through the organisation

To:

Redesigning or prioritising services, products and other actions for the year and aligning all the adaptations and changes in your teams and organization to deliver effectively.

 

Living Strategy Circles

How it Works

The Living Strategy Circle is a customized collaboration between a team of senior decision-makers of an organisation and expert representatives from Fraendi who meet in a Leadership Retreat lasting from 1 to 3 days.

It starts with a conversation. Fraendi associates will then analyze the situation and draw up an action plan that may include all or just some of the following steps.

1. Preparing the Partnership & Groundwork

For the best results, commit time and leadership energy to make this work:

  •     3 or more days committed time for leadership retreat(s), 
  •     6 months follow-on for the implementation: small prototypes resourced with people, budgets and prioritisation. 
  •     open and willing partnership with relevant parts of the organisation

We prepare the setting, timing and budget with you to understand your most important questions and select the people in your organisation to lead the process with us. Before the first retreat, we meet each participant for approx 30 mins to get to know them in the context of the strategy process and understand what is important for them.

2. Exploring the field: what your stakeholders want and need

This phase makes the crucial difference. We map your stakeholders by stepping into their shoes and seeing the world through their eyes. What is most important to them broadly and in contexts beyond the known ones. We identify the fine lines and patterns that connect across many contexts and worldviews, creating more contextual understanding. This is what gives orientation to revisit your business models and organisation’s positioning.

3. Revisiting or reinventing your business model

The new outlook clears the way for the strategy team to know which niche is out there for you. You (re-)design a portfolio of products, services, partnerships and interventions that together translate your purpose into reality and generates the right experience for each of your important stakeholders. You design a business model for each product/service. You will notice recurring patterns in many of the models, which will become the default model around which you (re)design and develop your organisation.

4. Reinventing your organisation: processes, structure and talent

The purpose of your organisation is simply to serve your (renewed) business model. How will the most simple and robust set of processes look to produce the services, products, deliveries and outcomes towards your field of stakeholders? What structure will contain and guide these processes? What type of success stories will people tell once this organisation is fully up and running?

5. Learning by doing: prototyping

Not every thing is needed to be big and fully developed at this stage. These questions need answers: How can the smallest full implementation of the new business model come to life? How will you concentrate resources into the new models? Where and how do you recruit the team(s) to get this started soon and well?

6. Setting up the living infrastructure for implementation

Once the plans are set, we know that reality will have its own dynamic. So you’ll create conditions for learning and adapting. What are the agreements for reviewing that, what will happen? What infrastructure for learning and ongoing discovery will make the realisation of the plans an enjoyable and fast exploit? What companionship and learning partnership will help you navigate through the unknown waters?

7. After the Retreat: Changing the organisation on the fly, in small doses

Some designated members of the leadership team act as sponsors for implementation teams that build the prototypes and test them. You follow the process and as a leadership group invite the teams to present their results and learnings to you. You will then give them orientation to expand the tests to a larger area, to continue developing, to end the prototype, etc.

Living Strategy Circles

Making it a Habit

A retreat every year

Doing this on an annual basis will ensure you stay connected to the wider context of your organisation. Each year, you will find this process to focus on different aspects of your business and organisational development as the priorities evolve year after year.

Who: For leadership teams

When: at any important decision moment in your organisation but at least once a year, the retreat is the beginning of a partnership and we accompany you through the prototyping, implementation and iteration processes.

About Us: experienced leaders, facilitators, change agents, process consultants who are connected with soul and deeply care about the shift required and the broader context in society. We will not work to sustain dead end paths; count on us looking for your potential and more life.

The Living Strategy Lab was a great process: challenging, highly participatory and creative. We worked on many different levels including using our physical and intuitive intelligences that enriched our engagement and our collective learning. The process enabled us to gain insights about our strategic direction, how our business model needed to change to deliver our strategy, and helped identify some obstacles to our effectiveness as an organisation. We emerged with individual and collective actions to take the work forward. I look forward to the next stage with the Living Strategy Lab team!

Julia Fell

Future Considerations

“We work with Fraendi because they bring a unique combination of know-how and practice to complex issues that arise in the area of tension between classic organisational development and what is called New Work. Rainer and Kaa help us to see the interdependencies between our different challenges and to approach our big issues in a creative and focused way. With Fraendi’s guidance, we can work through quite difficult issues in a short time while we learn to navigate complexity and grow together at the same time. We make a lot of progress each time and it is always connected to reality and thus promotes the vitality of our organization.”

Jürgen Reiner

CEO, SMA