Say “No!” to Dusty, Rigid Plans.
Make Strategy a Regular Habit

Staying Strategic is a series of workouts designed to help leaders stay clear, centered, and strategic as they navigate their everyday challenges. It’s a great way for changemakers to plan, and it’s particularly helpful in times of transition.

Participants find that the simple, regular act of getting things out of your heads and reminding yourself of what you already know and don’t know is incredibly grounding, especially in chaotic, overwhelming times. It’s a very good example of slowing down to speed up.

These workouts also strengthen your strategic muscles, a critical competency for leaders of all levels of experience, including aspiring.

To participate, join the Collaboration Gym!

For Whom?

Organizational and Team Leaders

Structured, safe space to get centered and do your own thinking before having to sync up with peers

Leaders, Consultants, and Facilitators

Get better at differentiating between good and bad strategy and aligning groups

Individuals Going Through Transitions

Get clear about what you want, where you want to go, and how to get there

We also offer Staying Strategic to groups as a more impactful, cost-effective way of doing strategic planning. It doesn’t just result in a plan, it builds everyone’s muscles for thinking and acting strategically. Groups find that questions and answers tracked over time is an effective way to plan that is inherently collective, emergent, and aligning. (For more on this, see Acting Strategically.)

For questions, pricing, or other information, contact info@nullfasterthan20.com and subscribe to our mailing list below.

From Participants’ Mouths

When we first designed Staying Strategic in 2020, we prototyped the program with 22 participants. Afterward, we asked many of them to describe the program and share their experiences. We loaded the videos of our conversations into NotebookLM, and it created the following video summarizing those conversations. We thought you might find it useful, so we’re sharing it here.

To participate, join the Collaboration Gym!

Roadmap

1. Questions (and Answers) 2. Where Do You Want to Go? 3. How Might You Get There?
Surface key questions, get clear about what you know and don’t know, and start pulling out the story of what you’re trying to do and why. Get clear and specific about what success looks like Play with different scenarios for how to achieve success.

We also encourage people to follow up Staying Strategic with Fail Fast Forward as a way of defining possible experiments for moving forward.

Workout Schedule

Staying Strategic is offered every month except for December. (See Collaboration Gym for the calendar.) For first-time participants, the workouts consist of seven workouts over four weeks. All of the workouts are one-hour long, except for the last two (Backcasting and Experiments), which are 90 minutes.

If you’ve done Staying Strategic before, you can participate in any of the workouts you’d like. You can also participate in any of the Collaboration Gym’s monthly Accountability Checkin (first Tuesday of every month), peer coaching sessions that help keep you on track.

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri
Week 1 9:30am PT — Question Dumping (1hr)
Week 2 9:30am PT — Question Dumping (1hr) 9:30am PT — Question Sensemaking (1hr)
Week 3 9:30am PT — Question Sensemaking (1hr) 9:30am PT — Success Spectrum (1hr)
Week 4 9:30am PT — Backcasting (1hr 30min) 9:30am PT — Backcasting (1hr 30min)