Forward
Our flagship strategy advisory and education program
Combining leadership education with strategy advisory, to move you and your people forward
Forward is our flagship strategy advisory and education program. It has been designed to combine the depth and rigour of strategy advisory with the knowledge and skill uplift of leadership development.
We believe that by bringing together strategy and education, both outcomes are improved. An organisation’s strategic direction should be positively influenced by tapping into the knowledge of its broader leadership team. At the same time, professional development is enhanced when leaders apply their learnings to immediate and meaningful strategic challenges.
Similar to our Strategic Leaders Program, Forward is delivered over a nine- to 12-month time frame, in alignment with an organisation’s annual strategic planning cycle. In addition, Forward includes the use of scenario planning and other strategic foresight tools to explore significant strategic challenges with greater depth and rigour.
This program is particularly relevant to organisations facing significant change or high turnover, or wanting to improve alignment. It is explicitly designed to improve shared understanding across the leadership team and improve decision-making, prioritisation and collective accountability.
The thinking behind the program
In most organisations, strategy and leadership are treated quite differently. Strategy is the domain of the executive team, and leadership education is very much seen as a learning and development activity.
What this ignores is the fundamental role that strategic thinking plays in effective leadership across all levels of an organisation. Leadership requires a clear sense of direction, and your people leaders can’t lead if they don’t first have clarity as to where they are and where they need to be headed.
This clarity requires leaders to step back, see the bigger picture and understand both:
how their division, department or team contributes to the broader organisation; and
the broader strategic environment in which they need to operate.
The good news is there are a handful of strategically significant events in every planning cycle where it makes sense to think more strategically. They are the moments when leaders stop to reflect on what has been done, or plan and prioritise for what’s next. Broadly, these events can be categorised into four ‘seasons’ or quarters within an annual cycle: building strategic understanding, prioritisation and planning, implementation, and maintaining and measuring.
Each of these seasons has a related set of strategic skills. By aligning professional development opportunities with the core activities in each season, there is an opportunity to both enhance learning and improve strategy. This is the core thinking behind the program.
Forward program design
Each engagement is co-designed to suit the organisation’s context and align with its annual planning cycle. To achieve this, a design session is held with the sponsor and relevant stakeholders to identify the timing of key strategic events, areas of opportunity and potential strategic challenges worthy of collective exploration. A program schedule is then developed to respond to the organisation’s needs.
A typical program might include:
strategic and emerging risk identification with the ELT and board
small group mentoring
ad-hoc advice and decision support
The emphasis is on addressing real strategic issues, building a shared language, improving alignment across the leadership team, and creating space for higher-quality conversations and collective decision-making.
Mayor, Baw Baw Shire Council
Some of the organisations Simon has inspired
Simon’s client base includes a range or public, private and purpose driven organisations.
