The UK operations leadership of a global agribusiness needed time off-site to step back from operational pressure and sharpen the strategy that would shape the year ahead. Two days in central London gave the team a shared answer and a shared way of running against it.
The operations lead brought me in to design a two-day strategy workshop for the leadership group. The brief was straightforward in framing but harder in practice: give the team two days to step back from the operational treadmill, sharpen the strategy for the year ahead, and leave with something the team owned rather than something they had been given.
The initial planning call was about scoping. The lead was clear that the team did not need new strategic content imposed from outside. They needed structured time and external facilitation to do the strategic work themselves. The role of the workshop was to provide the framework, the discipline, and the space, not to deliver an answer.
I designed the two days around the Strategy Choice Cascade, used in a lighter, more conversational mode than the e-commerce hackathon I had run a few weeks earlier. The team did not need rapid concept generation. They needed deliberate, careful work on each of the cascade's five questions, with time to disagree productively and converge honestly.
Pre-work was kept lean. A short prompt to each member of the team to bring, in their own words, what they thought the team's winning aspiration should be and what they thought the team was avoiding. Two paragraphs each, sent ahead of the workshop, read into the design without being shared back to the group.
Day one opened on winning aspiration and where to play. I used the pre-work themes to frame the morning, with the team able to recognise their own contributions in the language without anyone being identified. The afternoon moved to how to win, with the work focused on the genuine differentiators the team could commit to versus the ones that sounded good but the operating model could not actually support.
Day two turned to must-have capabilities and management systems, the cascade questions that most strategic conversations short-cut. I worked through what would need to be in place for the how-to-win answer to be deliverable, where the gaps were, and how the management systems, cadences, decision rights, ways of working, would need to shift to support the strategy.
I closed with a strategic commitments exercise: each member of the team named the specific commitments they were making personally to the agreed strategy. Written down, signed off, owned.
The team left with a sharpened strategy across the five questions of the cascade, and a set of personal commitments that translated the strategy into specific behaviours each leader was accountable for.
The structural outputs are the ones most useful for repeat use. A single-page articulation of winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the must-have capabilities the team is building toward, and the management systems shifts they are making to support the strategy. A list of named strategic commitments, one per leader, that the team can revisit at quarterly reviews.
The most useful framing for a strategy workshop with an operations team is that the work is not the strategy itself, it is the agreement on the strategy. Operations teams are usually better at strategic thinking than they give themselves credit for. The thing they are missing is structured time and a framework that holds the conversation honest. The Strategy Choice Cascade is that framework, and two days is that time.
The lesson I am carrying forward into similar operations engagements: invest pre-work time in the winning aspiration question specifically. The other four cascade questions become much easier when winning aspiration is named honestly up front. Pre-work that asks two paragraphs on aspiration is a better investment than pre-work that asks for sector analysis or competitor benchmarking.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
