Strategy planning reinvented: The fast path to action and ownership
Strategy planning reinvented: The fast path to action and ownership
In this episode of the Fearless Thinkers podcast, host Rick Cheatham is in conversation with Kathryn Clubb, CEO of BTS North America, and Alex Amsden, Vice President of Change and Transformation at BTS, to explore the evolving landscape of strategic planning for senior leaders. They dive into the importance of engaging all levels of an organization in strategy formation and execution, the challenges of adapting to rapidly changing conditions, and the critical role culture plays in bringing strategy to life. Tune in to discover how top leaders are shaping strategies that are both resilient and adaptive, setting their organizations up for long-term success.
Most of us want to lead in a way that matters; to lift others up and build something people want to be part of.But too often, we’re socialized (explicitly or not) to lead a certain way: play it safe, stick to what’s proven, and avoid the questions that really need asking.
This podcast is about the people and ideas changing that story. We call them fearless thinkers.
Our guests are boundary-pushers, system challengers, and curious minds who look at today’s challenges and ask, “What if there is a better way?”If that’s the energy you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.
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Rick: This is Rick Cheatham, host of Fearless Thinkers. On today's show, I've got Will Heard, a Director out of our London office who specializes both in transformation and leadership, and Fredrik Schuller, who is head of BTS Coach and also has historically managed some of our most complex and innovative transformation and leadership projects.We're going to be doing something a little different on today's show and talking about a specific solution that they developed in partnership with the Corporate Research Forum in the UK targeted at helping learning leaders more effectively run their organizations. And it's one of those things that we don't pretend for a second to know more than our clients do about running their business, but we have had the opportunity to work with top performing organizations globally. So they created something along with our friends at the CRF to. Enable our clients and frankly, give back to our community to help us all get better results.
Rick: Fredrik, Will, welcome to the show.Will: Pleasure to be here.
Fredrik: Thank you.
Rick: So Fredrik, it's been a minute. How’ve you been?
Fredrik: I've been good. Last night, for the first time in a long time, I went to a concert with my favorite band over the last three years, and it was just incredible.Rick: I know you're a big music guy, so I'm shocked that it's been three years. I guess the joys of having small children as well.
Fredrik: Yes.
Rick: How about you, Will? What have you been up to these days?
Rick Cheatham: Welcome to today's show! I am so excited to be sitting down with Kathryn Clubb, who's the CEO of BTS USA, and actually has over 30 years working with clients on strategy development, change, and helping clients make the most strategic shifts in their culture and ways of working. Also, I've got Alex Amsden, who is a Senior Director here at BTS and a leader in our culture and transformation team. And Alex probably knows more than I ever will about what makes a great company culture and how they develop and change over time. We're talking today about strategy development and really challenging traditional thinking around what makes a great strategy, what's required in today's environment, and how to really engage and organization to take quick action and get results.So, Kathryn, Alex, welcome to the show.
Kathryn Clubb: Hi, Rick.
Alex Amsden: Thank you.
Rick: So Kathryn, I'm curious, what's been going on in your world?Kathryn: Well, I'm here today in Phoenix at 105 degrees, but the advantage is I've got to spend the last two days with 80 of our enablement people, the people who keep the wheels in the bus and keep BTS rolling. So it's been great to spend time with them.
Rick: Did you fry an egg in the parking lot? Cause I think you're obligated to do that as an out of towner in Phoenix.
Kathryn: I have never done that, but I'm not gone yet.
Rick: There you go. How about you, Alex?
Alex: Well, it's summertime, so my daughter got a scooter and we've been doing a lot of scootering in the park.
Rick: I am actually quite jealous. My daughter got married a few weeks ago, so we're in very different stages of our lives.
Alex: Very different.
Rick: Well, hey, I really appreciate you both being here today and I'm very excited to talk to you a bit on some of the work you've been doing with our clients and strategic planning and some of the shifts you've seen and what the best of the best are really doing when it comes to planning their strategy.
Kathryn: One of the things that's interesting to me is how loosely the word strategy is used. So you know, when we work with our clients, we have to be very clear. Are they creating a new strategy? Are they aligning people to the strategy? Are they setting priorities so the business units and functions know what they need to do to execute the strategy? Or have they been executing the strategy for a while, run into obstacles and then need to get those out of the way to continue to get the results they want.
Rick: Is it very dependent on where we are on that continuum when it comes to doing strategy formation work?
Alex: It's always good to revisit your strategy and particularly I think in this environment with things changing so rapidly to take a chance to actually think about the future and look at all of the different disparate trends that may be impacting our business. So spending time refreshing on that with the people who are closest to the customers, seeing the trends in practice, fighting against the competition, can be really helpful to inform the executives on what do we actually need to refresh about our strategy? What do we need to rethink both for the coming year and also as we think about planning and what's required to set you up for the future as well?
Rick: There was an assumption built into what you just said, Alex, that is very much in the heart of the work that you both do and may not be obvious to our audience. And that was when you said “with the people who were doing the work”. I've been in a lot of strategy sessions and a lot of strategy development sessions, and the people that are actually doing the work are either three to four levels below the people that are forming the strategy, or the people that are forming the strategy are outside consultants. I'm curious in the work that you're doing, what does that look like to have the people that are really doing the work part of the strategy development?
Kathryn: Let me reinforce something you said. It's a pet peeve and a prior sin of mine. I grew up as a traditional strategy consultant. You know, we were smart. We got in a room. We worked with just a few executives and we came up with these brilliant strategies, right? This was in the olden days where you would put them in a binder, the binder would sit in the shelf and maybe it would get implemented, maybe it wouldn't. And the thing that still happens, I'm appalled, but it still happens in this day and age where you can get people together virtually. We believe that the more people engaged in the strategy process, the better off you be. It does not mean that you have 17,000 people deciding the strategy of a company. It is still not only the role, but even the obligation of senior leaders to set the direction, probably set the goals, work with their shareholders to see what are the metrics that they most need to go at. But if you do not engage people early on in the how, they won't understand the what. And doing that in a way that people really get it allows them to do what Alex said, which is pivot and change when conditions change. The strategy may not change, but the conditions in which you need to implement do. So thinking about how you're going to implement while you're talking about what you have to do is actually a best practice in the strategy formulation area.
Alex: To say that even more simply: the most innovative strategy is not going to be helpful if your people don't believe in it or can't execute it. So, involving them early helps to actually raise some of those issues early on so that they can be resolved more quickly in execution.
Rick: So, I'm doing my best to put myself in, the mind of a well-intentioned, business unit head, and I'm thinking: yeah, it sounds smart from an execution standpoint, but if we're bringing people in, when we're still trying to figure out our direction, is that going to potentially build unnecessary fear, ambiguity, even a lack of confidence in us as a leadership team?
Kathryn: I think that's a really good question. And I think you've just expressed what the fear is of many executives about including people because they believe they are obligated to have all the answers. Guess what? They're human beings too. They can't possibly have all the answers. And in many cases, they're not the people who are closest to customer who are closest to the competitors who are closest to the front line and what those, realities are. And so, by engaging those perspectives and making sure that they're different perspectives, you actually create a plan, a strategy, and priorities that everybody feels that they own.
Alex: We were recently working with a CEO and executive team to set their next three to five year plan. And it was really all about that entrepreneurial spirit and continuing to get the next deal. And when they actually brought the next level of leaders into the conversation to think about their priorities for their next three to five years, the leaders brought up a lot of the realities and made the point to the executives that yes, we want the entrepreneurial spirit and we want to continue to opportunistically go after new growth areas. And at the same time, we can't actually bolster and protect our core business in the way that we should to stay competitive for the future if we're always spending time over here.
Rick: Yeah. And it's, funny, the thing that really stuck in my head there, Alex, is: three to five years? Most people don't know what's happening in three to five quarters. How are we building strategies, or is it essential to build strategies, that can shift and pivot quickly?
Kathryn: It's the reality. It's probably been the reality since the 2000s, whether we believe it or not. We're not saying throw out your annual budgeting process. We're not saying throw out your long range plan. But how you're actually going to execute and get to those business results is really about executing in the current conditions. And that's why we believe you have to have more leaders engaged because when they've internalized that purpose, they can figure out the three-four-five-infinite number of ways that you can actually make that happen. We're talking about imbuing leaders with the intention of the strategy so every day they can wake up and say, today is the day that I'm going to help make the most powerful offering for our client. Their job (mid-level leaders, frontline leaders) is to actually figure out the most powerful manifestation of that strategy given the current conditions. I do believe you can have a purpose and even goals that persist over a three to five year period. And the number of ways that you're going to figure out how to execute against those are going to change enormously. Let me give you an example. We have a client that has put together, kind of a technology ecosystem from pharma to providers to pharmacists to physicians to patients. And they built this over time. They had the right applications and tools for each one of those various stakeholder groups. And now they have to put it all together, right? And so while they had a single focus maybe on a pharmacist or on a provider, they now have to look at the entire ecosystem. They're doing the same thing. They have exactly the same purpose. They have just upped the challenge to themselves to create a seamless technology ecosystem that really provides something very special and helps innumerable patients get medications they need faster and more cheaply. And so, what they're trying to do, is now more possible because of technology. And they changed how they're going to do it. They've not changed their purpose. They've not even changed who's really going to benefit from it.
Rick: Circumstances market conditions can shift even sometimes dramatically, but the core strategy doesn't need to necessarily pivot as quickly. But I am assuming that within any new strategy, there are shifts in ways of working that have to happen. Part of your approach is getting people involved, getting them to author their own future.
Alex: Yeah, and one of the problems that we see often is leaders go publish the strategy and tell everyone to go execute it and then say, you're empowered to go figure it out. I've told you the strategy. Go figure it out. And I think we've seen time and time again how that doesn't work. And we've seen lots of examples of executives coming back to consultants and saying, “I've told the strategy over and over again to my teams, we're not seeing anything change”. So I think there's a little bit of a balance there. And what we've seen work really well is not stopping at defining the strategy, but then actually engaging people in what's different about that strategy and making sure that everyone has the same assumptions and they're working towards the same picture of success. We had one client in financial services who had a new pricing transformation that was a piece of the strategy that had milestones against it, a roadmap, people were working on it. We brought them together midway through the year to actually work on what's working well with the priorities, what's not, and where might we need to adjust. And the amount of people who had a different understanding of what pricing transformation meant was incredible. It really shocked the executive team who thought that it was very clear. So I think people can figure it out and it's really important that they're marching in the same direction and are clear on what the shift is we're really asking them to make so that they can go execute. And then, as Kathryn said, pivot when conditions change with that same North star that they're working towards in mind.
Kathryn: I have another example of what Alex was just talking about. I was once working with a foundation. and they had come up with a new three-pronged strategy. There was a head of strategy and a CEO, and most of the people in the organization did not feel comfortable or did not feel like they understood the strategy. So we were getting leadership team together and we created a set of conversations that they would have. And one of them was to have each one of their three major areas actually play back the strategy as if they really understood it and believed in it. And each one of these three groups actually did a fairly spectacular job expressing it. The executives’ only response at that point was “perfect, so much better than when I said it myself”. And so they took all these people who said, we don't understand the strategy, asked them to put it in their own words, and then got the reinforcement that yes, they actually had it. But the interesting thing for the CEO and the head of strategy is, if they don't get it right, this is feedback to you, not to them.
Rick: That's a great example, Kathryn. So Alex, take me just a little bit deeper into the role that culture plays in strategy execution,
Alex: Yeah, Rick, one thing that we see often is that organizations are thinking about strategy and culture as two separate things. Often how people are organized in organizations is you have, you know, the head of strategy/the strategy team, and then you have the people team or the people/culture team, and they often are tackling kind of separate things. We would actually argue that those things need to be tackled together. You can have the best strategy and initiatives in the world, but if the way that you're working is getting in the way of that strategy, it's not going to go anywhere. The most classic example I've seen in a lot of organizations we've worked with is adopting an agile operating model where all of a sudden, we go from hierarchical kind of vertical organization to cross functional teams who are supposed to be empowered to work together closer to the customer. All of a sudden, as a leader, when you go from vertical hierarchical model to an agile leader, your job is no longer to tell people what to do who are below you. It's actually to push decisions down to the team and remove obstacles for them. That is a big shift in what you're paid to do as a leader, right? You grew up and got promoted for telling people what to do, giving them the answers, and all of a sudden, you need to actually not do that, ask them better questions, and help them navigate the organization. So that is a huge shift that is enabling the strategy, but it actually has to do with your culture, right? In any strategy discussion, there should be a piece of it that is around ways of working: What behaviors, what mindsets do we need to execute this well? What do we want to keep doing that's really successful? And what are the things that are maybe getting in our way or will slow us down as we think about executing this new strategy?
Kathryn: I want to make one point about very transformational strategies. You learn more about what's required over time. I remember working with one, SaaS technology company who did a wonderful job articulating the strategy. We worked with them to put it in a bit of a simulation, and we actually took it to their entire organization within a month. Momentum was high. Enthusiasm was high. Understanding was exactly where it needed to be. And within six months, they realized that there were some misconceptions about what customer service looked like specifically. And so then you could go back and you could identify what mindsets needed to shift around customer success given this new strategy. It was not obvious when they first identified the strategy, but it turned out to be a very pivotal shift that they had to make they only got it after they've been doing it for a while.
Rick: That makes a lot of sense.
Kathryn: And one of the really important things that almost never gets done in strategy is trying to take the concepts and make them practical, executable, implementable. Strategy on a page, is an idea. It's just an idea. Until people can play with it, shape it, start figuring out what would I have to do to do this. So we work very hard, either through modeling an entire enterprise so people can see what levers they have to pull to make different changes happen, or just asking the kinds of questions that put people into the execution and implementation of it. They have to envision themselves implementing this: either explaining it through their employees, or figuring out what initiatives they need to do in their business unit or function. And when you do that – when you take a concept and start making it feel more real – you raise the right reservations. You start getting smarter about what will be easy and what will be hard in making this happen. And then, if you're a senior team and you have to commit to the strategy, you have a much better understanding of what you're committing to, right? It's like committing to marriage after a first date. After you've dated for a long time, you actually have a better idea of what you're committing to, right? It's a little like that. You actually have the experience that says, okay, I can commit to this and I can commit to it even knowing this, this, this will be difficult. So I think it is more fair to leaders to help them really understand what they're saying yes to – because otherwise, we're kind of setting them up for failure.
Rick: What I’m hearing you say is until I have to try it on and deal with real tension, it doesn't become real.
Kathryn: Yes. And, certainty is impossible. A lot of people like making plans and then they become confident of their plans. Now they're implementing their plans in an uncertain future. I think the right mindset for leaders today is to put together plans, but be confident in their people to execute those plans, even in times of uncertainty. The shift goes from confidence in the plan to confidence in the people. And if your confidence is in the people, what are you going to do to set them up for success? That's what we're talking about.
Rick: So I'm sure that there are some folks out there listening who have senior level responsibility for strategy development. And I'm sure that there are some folks out there listening who don't, but really like what they heard. What's your best advice for them? How could they start to influence their organization to rethinking how their strategies are formulated and executed?
Kathryn: There's one thing that's almost too simple to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. I actually believe that everybody in organization should understand how their work and how their priorities align to the overall priorities of the organization. And if you can't actually see that direct link, you should question if that's something you should be doing. And the other part of that for a leader is if every person in the organization cannot see how they're contributing to it, have they thought about the strategy as fully as they need to? It's a two-part test, if you will, when a strategy or new priorities for a fiscal year come out is: can you see yourself in this future? Because if you cannot see yourself in the future, you have no initiative to go out and try to make things happen.
Alex: People in the organization have a very important view to share back up to the leaders of the organization on what they're seeing. Feel ownership of taking a critical eye to what you're seeing and playing back some of the customer insights or market shifts that you are seeing because likely you are seeing them differently than the executives in your organization are, and that information is really valuable to inform where the company should go in the future.
Rick: Great advice. Thank you both so much. And thanks for taking the time to sit down with us today and, really look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Kathryn: Thanks, Rick.
Alex: Thank you.
Rick: Thanks for joining me today. It’s always a pleasure to bring to you our Fearless Thinkers. If you’d like to stay up to date, please subscribe. Bios for our guest and links to relevant content are always listed in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch, please visit us at BTS.com, and thanks so much for listening!
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In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.
Here’s the field-notes version.
Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.
The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.
What it felt like inside the flywheel.
When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:
“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”
There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.
Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.
The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.
I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.
The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.
What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.
Explore.
Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.
Expand.
Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.
Institutionalize.
Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.
Renew.
Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.
What had to be true for this to scale.
Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.
Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.
The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.
Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.
Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.
Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.
What we’re seeing across clients.
We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.
If this resonates, let’s talk.
If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.
Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.
The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.
If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.
In today’s business environment, strategy no longer unfolds neatly from vision to execution. Disruption is constant, complexity is accelerating, and expectations are shifting in real time. In this context, strategy that is overly scripted becomes brittle. The organizations that thrive today are the ones that have learned to improvise. Not reactively, but with intention, agility, and confidence. To many executives, the idea of “strategy improv” might sound risky or chaotic. In truth, great improvisation is neither. It is a learned discipline rooted in presence, trust, and adaptability. It is what enables teams to respond purposefully in the face of the unexpected. And it is quickly becoming a core leadership capability for our times.
Why strategy needs to shift
For decades, the dominant model of strategy has been based on control. A select few defined the vision, cascaded goals through layers of the business, and expected execution to follow. Success was measured by fidelity to the plan. The world no longer works that way. Markets are volatile. We are in a technology super cycle. Customer needs evolve faster than product roadmaps. And the economic, geopolitical, and environmental future is increasingly uncertain. Rigid strategies struggle to survive this level of flux. They become outdated before implementation begins. Worse, they force teams into patterns of execution that ignore emerging data, evolving context, or untapped insight. What is needed now is not more precision. What is needed is more adaptability.
Strategy as intention, not prescription
In improvisational terms, a strategic plan is no longer a fixed script. It is a shared intention. It is a direction, not a destination. It is a compass, not a map. The core strategic question is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges in service of our purpose?” This does not mean abandoning structure or discipline. In fact, it demands more of both. But the emphasis shifts from defining every move in advance to cultivating the conditions where people can make smart decisions in the moment. Here is the distinction:
- A goal says: “We will grow 17 percent in revenue.”
- An intention says: “To grow 17 percent, we will delight our clients, grow our impact, and operate with excellence to unlock long term value.”
The first is measurable. The second is both meaningful and measurable. And it is meaning that enables action when the path becomes unclear.
What improv really means
Improv in business is ripe for misunderstanding. It is not winging it or hoping for the best. Great improv is highly disciplined. It is grounded in preparation, presence, and shared principles. Here are a few improv principles that matter most for leaders and teams:
- Yes, And… Build on what is already in motion instead of shutting it down. That is how momentum grows.
- Make Your Partner Look Good. Execution is collective. Leaders who elevate others create trust and shared ownership.
- Be Present. You cannot rely on what worked yesterday or predict what comes tomorrow. Execution happens in this moment.
- Listen for What Is New. Do not just confirm your beliefs. Notice weak signals, dissenting voices, and emerging shifts.
- Commit to the Scene. Once you step in, go all in. Half-hearted execution drains energy and derails progress.
These are not stage tricks. They are everyday disciplines for how leaders and teams show up together when the path is not clear.
The boundary: What can and cannot be improvised
Not everything can or should be improvised. You cannot spin up a new factory in six weeks or redo a regulatory filing on the fly. Capital projects, infrastructure, hiring pipelines, and compliance require structure, discipline, and lead time. Within those guardrails, much of execution is improv. The actions and moves you make can and show flex with the need and the moment. Such moves might include:
- How you respond to a customer this week
- How you redeploy resources when a competitor surprises you
- How you adjust product features in response to early user feedback
The art is knowing the difference. Improv lives inside the boundaries, not outside them. And that is where the advantage lies.
We know it works
We have already seen this in action. During COVID, strategy as improv was not optional. Plans dissolved overnight. Leaders had to pivot in real time, trust their teams, and reimagine value on the fly. Many succeeded, not because they had the perfect plan, but because they had the capacity to improvise. Consider two everyday situations:
- Telecommunications company: With hardware and software tightly linked, this company faced constant tension between short-term changes in a release and the permanence of installed infrastructure. By learning to improvise in the short term with software while anchoring their long-term vision in hardware roadmaps, they delivered quick wins without derailing future value. To do so, leaders had to abandon siloed “hardware first” or “software first” thinking and live in both worlds at once.
- Global manufacturer: Preparing for volatility in regulation and transportation, this company had shifted to thinking of its manufacturing footprint as a portfolio of capabilities rather than fixed plants. When sudden shifts hit sooner than expected, they could improvise quickly, rebalancing capacity across countries, not because they were ready but because they had already rehearsed some of the moves. The adjustments were urgent, but they felt planful.
These are not exotic cases. They are reminders that when strategy execution meets reality, it is the organizations that can improvise with purpose that thrive.
From plans to response
The core strategic question has changed. It is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges?” Capacity, creativity, and commitment to the purpose and intention of the strategy, not certainty, are now the keys to competitive advantage. Those attributes are built through people: their judgment, their alignment, and their ability to act in service of shared priorities.
How to build strategic improv into your organization
Improv is not just an individual skill. It is an organizational capacity. Here are five practical ways to embed it into how your teams work:
- Ground the organization in purpose and priorities. Make sure everyone knows the “why” behind your strategy. Not just the outcomes you are chasing, but the value you aim to create. Purpose creates the throughline that allows teams to improvise without drifting.
- Build enterprise perspective at all levels. Give people visibility into how their choices affect the whole. When teams understand upstream and downstream impacts, they act with greater confidence and coordination.
- Normalize adaptation, not perfection. Shift the narrative from flawless execution to responsive evolution. Celebrate learning, reward and highlight intelligent risk taking, and treat change as a constant, not a crisis.
- Practice collective sensemaking. Create space for cross functional conversation, reflection, and signal sensing. Encourage teams to bring forward what they are noticing, not just what they are reporting.
- Train for improvisation. Just as improv actors practice, so can your leaders. Build their capacity to navigate ambiguity, connect dots, and co-create solutions in real time. The payoff is not just agility. It is resilience.
Final thought
Strategy execution today is less about control and more about capability. It is less about knowing the answers and more about creating the conditions where your people can discover the right answers for now, together. Companies that thrive in uncertainty will not be the ones with the tightest plans. They will be the ones that can improvise with purpose, with confidence, and with each other. When the world will not wait, improv is not optional. It is the new strategic advantage.
Nearly every leader I talk to knows the old planning model doesn’t make sense anymore. Multi-month cycles. Layers upon layers of initiatives. Budgets that quietly replace strategy as the plan. By the time it’s all done, the competitive landscape has already shifted under their feet. And yet, many companies still do it this way. They can feel the mismatch as they strive to move fast. They just don’t know what to do instead. The old game was setting direction. Decide where to go. Communicate it. Cascade it down. It made sense when the future looked enough like the past that you could be certain of your choices. But certainty is gone. In its place: disruption, surprise, and acceleration. Which means the work of leaders has shifted. The new game is adapting direction.
What needs to be new and different
If strategy execution today is about improv, then strategy setting is no longer about choreography. It requires a more flexible approach. Here are four flaws of traditional strategy planning, and what leaders can do differently:
1. Stop pretending there’s only one future.
We know the future won’t unfold exactly as envisioned. Customer needs shift. Competitors surprise you. Economies wobble. So why do we plan for just one version of what’s next? When one “winning” idea emerges too fast, it often gets momentum without being stress-tested. A better approach:evaluate multiple distinct directions at the same time. One executive team we worked with had five competing visions for doubling the business in three years. Instead of forcing consensus, we worked with them to think through the core choices for each, including customer focus, product bets, and geographic expansion. Once leaders saw the real implications, they quickly ruled one option out. The eventual plan blended elements of the others, with contingencies built in. Thinking through alternatives gave them confidence and resilience when the inevitable twists came.
2. Make choices real before you announce them
Too many strategic plans race to the declaration moment at the Town Hall: here’s the big idea, now go execute. The problem? Leaders rarely know what they’ve actually signed up for, or what needs to change in how the work gets done. If you believe that strategy execution requires improv, then even in setting strategy you need to imagine what comes next and rehearse moves, implications, and ripple effects across future time horizons, albeit in a simpler but realistic form. One client we worked with knew that acquisitions were essential to their growth. They had several targets in sight and negotiations underway, but no imminent deal. Instead of waiting, we ran the extended leadership team through a series of acquisition scenarios with different strategic intent that examined variables such as deal size, level of integration, and adjacency of the added business. As they worked through each scenario, they not only got a view into the nature of potential targets but also what changes they, as the leaders of the organization, needed to make now. They were choosing what kind of organization they would become. Based on what they were learning, they were able to make key decisions to position themselves for future success. They agreed on new hiring profiles, streamlined decision processes, leadership shifts, so they’d be ready when the right deal came. Strategy shifted from a conceptual statement to a real, lived preparation for a different future.
3. Work across time horizons.
People can change fast. Infrastructure and capital cannot. Budgets, board approvals, and physical assets move slowly. Leaders need to intentionally plan for what can change now, what will take time, and what’s locked in, while still identifying the opportunities at each stage. Take a pharma company with a pipeline bursting with new drug development. If even half their drugs made it through approval, their manufacturing capacity would be insufficient. Together we built an adaptable manufacturing plan, anchored on essentials, with clear trigger points for future decisions. When 70% of the drugs cleared approval, they were ready. Without that horizon-based thinking, they would have been caught flat-footed.
4. Align at the right level of detail.
Here’s a trap: mistaking varied interpretation of the strategy for purposeful improvisation. They are not the same. Without clarity and alignment at the top, every leader fills in gaps differently. That isn’t agility, it’s chaos. Leaders must turn the conceptual strategy into something tangible and real, in order to be able to align and lead the organization in the same direction. Strategic modeling allows leaders to test choices at the right level of fidelity, so they know what they’re actually agreeing to. Growing “a lot” versus growing 37% are not the same thing. The detail that is uncovered in the modeling exercises provides enough clarity to shape coherent execution, while still leaving room for adaptive moves over time.
From map to compass
Old strategy setting was about certainty. New strategy setting is about clarity of intent and readiness to adapt. It’s less a map and more of a compass. If your strategy and planning process still looks like a marathon toward a finished plan, ask yourself: are you preparing for the world you wish you had, or the one you actually face? The trick is helping leadership teams shift from setting direction to adapting direction—so strategy setting and execution can adapt. The future won’t wait for your plans.
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