What’s a Strategy Sprint and why would I need one?

A constant necessity for organisations to remain compelling, competitive and sustainable is to continually assess potential threats and opportunities.

But often, even high performing teams struggle to prioritise the most impactful initiatives to focus on and as a result, everything becomes a priority.

So often, this leads to inefficiency, frustration and disengagement.

SYMPTOMS OF A LACK OF STRATEGIC PLAN

  • Teams go around in circles weighing up the pros and cons of an opportunity or threat. Meetings, emails and open-ended conversations cause loss of momentum, duplicate work and miscommunication.

  • When roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined, once highly engaged talented team members become annoyed and doubt and cynicism sets in.

  • When people feel like they can’t impact their work their contribution drops to the minimum required, your once enthusiastic team members now hardly participate.

 

Sound familiar?

 

So how might we stop teams going round in circles, pick the best road to take whilst keeping everyone aligned and energised?

 

Enter the Strategy Sprint

Discover a straightforward approach for responding to new opportunities and threats facing your organisation.

Our Strategy Sprint is a series of workshops and a structured process for leadership teams to identify key challenges, create actions to overcome them, establish what to say no to and rekindle enthusiasm, momentum and ownership in teams.

 
 
“This process pushed us out of our comfort zone and circular decision making - and propelled us to take action!”
— YWCA Strategy Sprint participant
 
 

The Anatomy of a Strategy Sprint

A Strategy Sprint happens over three weeks or “phases” depending on the team's availability.

The ideal team size for a Strategy Sprint is 7. Five people from your side, including a key decision-maker like a project owner or CEO, and two strategists from Korero Studio.

 
 

  • 🔦 We kickoff getting to know the organisation and how it operates today through desk research, workshops, one-to-one meetings and surveys.

  • ⚡️ Week two is where the magic happens, a multidisciplinary team of 5-7 people come together to align, ideate and plan a winning business strategy.

  • 🗺 Week three, we take all our findings and learning and create an action plan for teams to implement. We'll invite you all back to present the report.

    • A clear purpose defining what makes your organisation unique

    • Assessment of critical strengths and limitations

    • A set of clear guiding policies to establish direction

    • A roadmap with critical experiments to implement strategy over the next 6-12 months

    • Clear documentation shareable report of workshop results and guidance

    • Executive Summary & Recommendations

    • Make everyone feels included in the strategy i.e the board, advisory panel, and staff

 
 

Your team will need to be present for the workshop sessions, we’ll take care of the rest.

Our Strategy Sprint gives you answers to questions like:

  • Why does our organisation, team or department exist?

  • What opportunities exist (or can we create) to offer unique value, better than anyone else in the market?

  • Is this the right opportunity for us and is this the right time for us to act?

  • How might we assess what initiatives to chase and those to say no to?

  • How do we want the people in our organisation to work?

  • How might we build ownership and accountability throughout the organisations?

One of our client’s recent experience sprinting with us:

 

Korero’s approach is creative, flexible, fast-paced, thought provoking, and it delivers real results.

Korero supported YWCA Scotland with a series of strategic design sprints to help us refine our mission and vision and define our biggest challenges and map out solutions to overcome them. I couldn’t recommend this process more – it gave us so much clarity, resolved some dilemmas we had been grappling with for years, and brought us closer as a team. Alex and Andy are amazing facilitators, and kept us engaged and challenged, making us think in ways we have not considered before. Their approach is creative, flexible, fast-paced, thought provoking, and it delivers real results. But while doing all of that and more, it is also fun! They took so much time to get to know our organisation and took us on this journey in a truly collaborative way.

Patrycja Kupiec - CEO of Young Women Scotland