Gets the grey matter working before we kick off.
Pre-work completed by participants in the week before the strategy workshop. Each person scans their usual sources for signals across six categories that mirror the Strategy Radar, then imagines future content from those same sources, and brings the collected signals into the opening session.
Signal Safari is sent to participants roughly one week before the workshop with a short briefing note. Instructions are kept light: the goal is curious observation rather than rigorous analysis.
The activity has two parts. The first is a scan structured around six questions that mirror the categories on the Strategy Radar canvas (Capability, Culture, Operations, Customers, Competition, Wider World), without naming the framework. Each question invites participants to look at the sources they already consume, trade press, LinkedIn, customer conversations, analyst reports, podcasts, newsletters, and notice what is showing up. The six questions prime participants to think across the full breadth of forces the Strategy Radar will map, so the canvas feels immediately familiar when they arrive at the workshop.
The second part is an imaginative move. Participants pick a few of the signals they have collected and imagine future content from the same sources: the trade press headline two years from now, the LinkedIn post their boss might share in eighteen months, the news segment about the regulation passing. This extends the scan from observation into projection, surfacing assumptions and possibilities that pure scanning often misses.
On the day, the facilitator uses the collected signals to seed the Strategy Radar canvas, drawing out patterns and prompting the group to notice what they are collectively seeing. Because the pre-work questions map to the Radar categories, the transfer from individual scan to group canvas happens naturally.
Signal Safari is pre-work: in the week before the strategy workshop, each person spends time scanning their environment and noting what catches their attention. The collected signals become the opening dataset for the session on the day.
Brief participants about a week before the workshop and ask them to spend forty-five to sixty minutes on the activity, in two parts. The first is a guided scan of the sources they already consume, using six questions: what new skills and ways of working are emerging; which beliefs are being questioned; how things get done; what customers are doing differently; who is doing something interesting; and what wider shifts are gathering momentum. Five to ten signals across the six questions is a good range. For each signal, they capture a brief headline, one sentence of context, and a note of where they spotted it.
The second part asks people to pick three or four of their signals and imagine future content from the same sources, such as the trade press headline in two years or the LinkedIn post in eighteen months. This surfaces assumptions and possibilities that pure scanning misses. On the day, the facilitator uses the collected signals to seed the session, and because the six scanning questions map to the categories used on the canvas, the transfer happens naturally: signals about new skills feed capability, signals about beliefs being questioned feed culture, and so on.
Use Signal Safari as pre-work in the week before a strategy workshop. Each person scans their usual sources for signals across six categories that mirror the Strategy Radar, so people arrive with concrete environmental intelligence to anchor the opening session.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
