The Strategy Reality Check · the little door into Earn the Right Future

Before you decide where you're going next, understand what happened last time.

What makes you think next year's strategy will work any better than last year's? The Strategy Reality Check is an evidence-led review of your last strategic cycle, held well before your next offsite. Its purpose is not to create the next strategy. It is to help you earn the right to create one.

Book an Explore callThree to four weeks, built around one facilitated day. £4,950 plus VAT.

The pattern

Then reality intervenes

Every year, leadership teams put real time and energy into their strategy. They review the market, debate priorities, set ambitions and leave the offsite with a renewed sense of purpose.

Then reality intervenes. Customers behave differently. Markets move. Resources tighten. Priorities compete. Some assumptions prove wrong. Some things work and others don't.

Twelve months later, the team gathers again to write the next strategy. How much of that time goes on understanding what happened to the last one?

In most agendas I see, very little. If last year appears at all, it's a slide of headline numbers in the first hour. Put the review at the front of the planning event and it gets rushed, because everyone knows the energising part comes after lunch. The same assumptions travel quietly into the new plan.

That's why the Reality Check gets its own time, well before the offsite. Reflection needs space to sit with an uncomfortable answer before anyone is asked to commit to the next one.

A new strategy is not necessarily a better strategy. It depends on what you were prepared to learn from the last one.

Why I care about this

Nobody holds a retrospective on a shop that's already shut

At nineteen I opened a clothes shop with my best friend, near Aberdeen University, on a business loan. It did reasonably well for about a year.

We hadn't checked the planning permissions around us. The lease was cheap for a reason. Our road was turned into a building site, the student trade disappeared, and we were left with a five-year lease and a bank loan to pay.

We negotiated our way out, did a few side deals, worked the markets. It taught me exactly how much I didn't know. It also taught me that the most useful questions are the ones you ask before, not after.

The Reality Check is how a leadership team asks those questions while there's still time to act on the answers.

What it's for

A shared, honest account of the last cycle

Establish the intent

What you were trying to achieve, the assumptions behind your choices and the outcomes you expected.

Confront reality

What happened, from the evidence rather than recollection or selective interpretation.

Understand the gaps

Whether the strategy was flawed, the execution fell short, or the world changed. Often it's more than one.

Surface what's been avoided

The differences in perspective, the unresolved tensions and the issues nobody has said out loud yet.

Find the lessons that matter

What to keep, what to stop, what to adapt and what to reconsider from the ground up.

Shape the next offsite

What has to be understood, resolved or prepared before you sit down to write the next strategy.

This is not an exercise in assigning blame. Nor is it a chance to defend previous decisions. It is a chance to learn.

How it works

Three phases, over three to four weeks

Phase 1

Investigate

I review the material that shaped and measured the last cycle: the strategy itself, objectives, OKRs and KPIs, board updates and performance against plan. Then I hold confidential interviews with six of your executive team, 45 to 60 minutes each, normally online. Nothing anyone says is attributed without their permission.

Phase 2

Confront reality

One full day with your executive team, typically six to ten people, built on the After Action Review. I bring the themes from the interviews as questions to test, not conclusions delivered in advance.

Phase 3

Shape what's next

Within five working days, your executive sponsor sees the first draft of a Strategy Learning and Readiness Report of around eight to twelve pages, including a design brief for your next strategy offsite. I then present it to your leadership team rather than just sending it, so the findings can be challenged. The final version, with that challenge built in, follows.

The day

Intent, reality, analysis, application

Opening: Can we examine our decisions without defending our positions?
Intent: What were we trying to achieve, and what did we assume would be true?
Reality: What happened? Activity, outputs and outcomes, kept apart.
Analysis: Why did we get the results we got?
Application: What must we do differently?
Readiness: What would need to be true for our next offsite to be productive?
Close: What are we prepared to change because of what we've learned?

Analysis is the heart of the day. It separates three explanations that usually get blurred together. A flawed strategic choice, built on assumptions that didn't hold. A failure of execution, where the direction was sound but the organisation lacked the alignment, capability or discipline to deliver it. And a change in circumstances that called for adaptation.

Then three tests. Where did leadership attention, resources and incentives contradict the declared strategy? Was the choice wrong, or did we fail to create the conditions to execute it? And what did we learn during the year that we never acted on?

The Earn the Right lens

Values before Vision. Vision before Method.

Values

What did our behaviour reveal?

What we rewarded, tolerated or ignored. Where short-term pressure overrode the principles we claimed.

Vision

Was the destination clear and credible?

Whether people understood what we were trying to become, and whether our choices were consistent with it.

Method

Did we build a system that could deliver?

Ownership, measures of progress, a management rhythm that supported decisions, and an organisation set up for outcomes rather than activity.

I use it as a lens through the interviews, the day and the report, not as another workshop method to learn. It asks whether you designed a good strategy, and whether you built an organisation capable of delivering it.

What you receive

An entry point, priced as one

Evidence review: An independent look at the last strategic cycle and the material behind it
Interviews: Six confidential executive interviews. Four for smaller teams
The day: One facilitated Strategy Reality Check for up to ten executives
Report: The Strategy Learning and Readiness Report: findings, lessons, a Values, Vision and Method assessment and prioritised recommendations
Offsite brief: The purpose, questions, decisions, evidence and people your next strategy session needs
Presentation: Your sponsor reviews the first draft. I present it to your leadership team so it can be challenged, then share a revised version with the feedback built in
From you: An executive sponsor, the relevant documents, and your team's time for interviews and the day
Price: £4,950 plus VAT for the full package. Travel and accommodation are extra

Sometimes the most useful finding is that you're not ready to write the next strategy yet. That's a legitimate outcome. The Reality Check stands on its own, and there is no requirement to bring me in for the offsite. If you want to go further, it becomes the starting point for an Earn the Right Future programme, where we take what you learned into the new strategy and use OKRs to drive it.

About your information. I use AI tools to help with the heavy lifting of preparation and reporting. They speed up the drafting. They don't replace the judgement. I review and refine everything before you see it, and every finding in the report is one I'm prepared to stand behind in the room. Before we start, I'll tell you which tools I use and what I use each one for. I only record an interview with the interviewee's permission, and you're welcome to record any of our sessions yourself. Interview transcripts are destroyed within seven days of the project ending, and the report never says who said what.

Learn from the last one first.

Book an Explore call. Tell me about your leadership team, what you have on paper from the last cycle and when your next offsite is. I'll confirm the scope and the fee.

Book an Explore call