A strategy workshop is for decisions. Gather the data before it, not during it

We start work on strategy with a list of questions sent to the client before anyone walks into the room. The reason is unromantic: a strategy workshop is a place for decisions, and you can't make decisions at the same time as you gather data. When the hours you have set aside go on establishing who our clients are and who our competitors are, everyone leaves feeling their time was wasted, and they are right.

There are seven blocks and the order is not accidental. Foundations: mission, vision, values, where we write the values down twice, the ones the company already has and the aspirational ones, and for each we add the behaviours that show you it is really being lived. The scope of the strategy and the company profile: what period we are writing it for, realistically two to three years at today's pace of change, which markets we are in today and which we want to be in at the end of that period. A diagnosis of current problems together with the assumptions we are making, meaning what has to stay true for the plan to make sense. Directions and the main strategic assumptions. Current initiatives and the project portfolio. Knowledge about the organisation: who is really responsible for the key areas, which critical skills are missing and how many people report to one person, because ten or more is a red flag. And the seventh block, lessons from previous periods: what worked in the last twelve months and why, what didn't work and why, what we learned from it.

Almost everything we ask about already exists in the company, just in a dozen or more places at once. You will get the client and market profile from sales reports and from the CRM. What the company really considers important today shows in the KPIs that the bonuses of the board and managers depend on. The value proposition sits in brochures and product presentations, the personas in marketing materials, and the challenges and risks in notes from board meetings, in previous attempts at writing a strategy and in the risk register, if anyone keeps one. A company that already works in a cycle of retrospectives gathers the lessons from the whole year in about five minutes. A company without that cycle still has to collect them, and that too tells you something about it.

The most important thing, though, is what you can't see on this list. The product of this work is not a folder of materials but a shared understanding of the current state within the board. Usually every person at the table has a different view of the clients, the competition and the challenges, and until that is aligned the strategic conversation goes nowhere. That is why we don't bring two hundred pages of report with a ready-made picture of the client's world and tell them this is what their market looks like. We ask what it looks like, because a strategy should be the board's vision supplemented by observations from outside, not the other way round. The list itself grew out of a slip of ours: we used to share the strategy OnePager and kept hearing that it was hard to fill in alone. It turned out to be a great tool for us, not for clients, because we know what belongs in each box. Working with questions is much easier than working with an empty box labelled strategic goals.