What is strategy?
Strategy is the discipline that helps us to identify what ministers and organisations want to achieve in government – desired outcomes – and the process and action to help those outcomes to be realised. Strategy work includes the following:
· Understanding what drives change
· Trends, forecasting techniques, futures analysis and horizon scanning
· Systems thinking and logical modelling
· Building and using scenarios in a practical way
· Working with stakeholders in a future-focused way
· Vision for organisations, sectors and policies
· Missions, goals and objectives for organisations
· Measuring success
· Delivery systems
· Strategic planning and strategic direction
Our approach
Our starting point is to help organisations understand what is driving change outside their organisations and to take a longer term perspective (e.g. five to ten year) of change. Our proposition is that all public sector organisations must understand their mission in terms of how it achieves positive impacts on society beyond the organisation itself. Only once that desired impact is understood and defined can we then help the organisation to set objectives, realign resources and conduct effective corporate planning. This is a key distinction between strategy in the public sector and the common approach to strategy in the private sector, where organisational performance in relation to competitors is the over-riding concern.
Training and Consultancy
We have five main areas of work:
1. We run open programmes in strategic thinking and strategy-making, typically two or three days long (more information here)
2. We contribute to other open courses, e.g. in leadership and in change
3. We run tailored interventions with departments, agencies and the wider public sector – typically over two days, but can be shorter, longer or modular
4. We run consultancy interventions for boards, departments and teams across government and the wider public sector, ranging from single interventions to longer term partnerships and call-off contracts
5. We manage the Strategy Exchange website www.nationalschool.gov.uk/strategyexchange