Turn strategy into action

An Amish barn raising by Randy Fath - Unsplash

There’s a basic duality about new strategies: people require space and permission to understand them and their relevance, while they’re under pressure to maintain the day to day business.

And if the process is badly managed new strategies are ignored and inevitably forgotten. 

Opening creative conversations

Truth & Spectacle recently ran a Provoke game session with a large organisation who had just launched a brave new strategy. The players came from across the country and had been selected as future leaders for the company.

With their Learning and Development, and Leadership team, we decided to use their new strategy as the Big Question for the game. In Provoke, the Big Question is the focus of the game and is usually framed as, “How can we (insert strategic objective)”. It’s a simple and well practised method of opening a creative conversation.

Dedicated space and time

Through creative play in a safe environment teams explore the Big Question as thoroughly as possible, with the objective of creating their own questions that can lead to better answers. 

Provoke is as much a game as it is a practise which allows for dedicated space and time to have conversations and insights that can lead to better business. 

During the process, this large group of future leaders, many of whom had just met for the first time, came to understand they weren’t alone in feeling confused by the brave new strategy. 

Many of them weren’t sure what it meant for their teams, or how to implement it.

Curious collaboration 

What was amazing to see though, was how a questioning mindset and creative play quickly opened the conversations up and kept them open rather than jumping straight back into solutions and answers. One person remarked, “Provoke showed me how to keep conversations open and diverse for as long as possible”. 

The questions swiftly moved from “why” to “how”, which is what new strategies are actually for - making things better.

The players quickly helped each other understand the possibilities of the new strategy, both positive and negative, and create meaningful questions their teams would answer later.

Collective understanding

Over the period of 4 hours we observed how teams built shared understanding and a change of perspective.  People were really surprised about the diversity of thought amongst people in similar roles and how a better question, a second question is sometimes all that’s it takes for abstract ideas to start making practical sense. 

Turning strategy into action. 

Provoke Good Question cards with the all-important workshop coloured dots.