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The Transperience Actbook: Staging the Strategy
Make it visible, tangible, and involving.
The classic concept of strategy (from the Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, "art of troop leader; office of command") refers to an overall plan to achieve goals. It began in the military as a method of defeating the enemy. Later, businesses adopted it as an approach to reaching objectives and winning competition.
Having a strategy means knowing what is needed to achieve what is wanted. In the past, this could have been a five-year plan. Now, it is hard to stick to a strategy for more than a few months or even weeks. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity set the scene and make it impossible to have a fixed idea of where you want to go and how you will get there.
The stakes are higher, things are more complicated, and the consequences are graver. Customers are unreliable, and employees are reluctant to play their roles in the corporate theater. As strategy work has become more of a calculated experiment than a portfolio of planned projects, the focus has changed from executing and implementing the strategy to staging it.
You may be unfamiliar with the idea of staging a strategy. Essentially, staging is about opening up the strategy process to exploit the thinking and action power of the many, not the few. It is…