OUR METHODS

A Strategic Leadership Forum turns strategic questions into shared leadership action.

We bring together a critical mass of leaders to work on the organization’s most consequential strategic issues. The forum combines partner professors’ research, case based learning, structured dialogue and facilitated work on live business challenges so leaders leave with shared understanding and commitments to act.

ON THIS PAGE

Strategic Leadership Forum

The process that moves a broad leadership group from a strategic issue to shared action.

The Case Method

A way to examine choices, surface assumptions and practice judgment together.

The forum is built around the strategy leaders must execute.

A Strategic Leadership Forum is a customized working session for a leadership group confronting an issue of strategic importance. Teams bring the performance gaps or opportunities they are accountable for addressing. The agenda is designed around those issues rather than a standard leadership curriculum.

The work joins analysis and problem solving with dialogue about the behaviors, assumptions and organizational conditions that affect execution. Leaders develop a common account of the issue and a structured plan for moving it forward.

Strategic issue

Teams bring a performance gap or opportunity they must address.

Education

Professors introduce research and tools that sharpen how leaders see the issue.

Dialogue

Teams test interpretations and surface the barriers they may be helping to sustain.

Commitment

Leaders agree the actions, ownership and conditions required to move forward.

A typical forum is designed for the work, not copied from a standard agenda.

The source format is approximately three and a half days. The scale and design change with the issue, the organization and the leaders who need to participate.

A critical mass of leaders

The source design accommodates as many as 100 participants working in up to eight teams.

Professors and practitioners

Partner professors bring the research. Senior practitioners facilitate each work team and connect the ideas to the business.

Tailored content and cases

The readings, cases and frameworks are chosen around the strategic questions the teams must resolve.

Working sessions, not presentations

Most of the forum is spent applying the ideas, comparing interpretations and developing commitments in teams.

The case method makes strategic ideas discussable.

A case gives leaders a common set of facts and a consequential decision to examine. They must take a position, explain the reasoning behind it and respond to interpretations that differ from their own.

The purpose is not to copy what another company did. The discussion creates enough distance to examine difficult choices openly, then brings the insight back to the organization’s own strategic issue.

Common evidence

Everyone works from the same facts, sequence of events and decision point.

Productive distance

Leaders can examine sensitive choices before turning directly to their own roles and commitments.

Judgment in practice

The discussion requires a recommendation and the reasoning that supports it, not passive agreement with a framework.

How we use cases inside the forum.

Select or create

Choose a case that illuminates the strategic issue, or develop one from the organization’s own experience.

Prepare

Leaders study the evidence and decide what they would do before hearing the group’s view.

Discuss

Small groups and a facilitated plenary make assumptions, disagreements and trade offs explicit.

Apply

Teams use the insight to reconsider their own issue, choices and responsibilities.

The forum is designed to create a turning point in execution.

A shared account of the strategic issue and what it requires of the organization.

The organizational barriers, assumptions and leadership behaviors that must be addressed.

A small set of actions, owners and near term commitments.

A critical mass of leaders able to explain the choices and carry them through with their teams.