For many companies, the main priority right now is simply preserving the business — survival, in other words. By some estimates, only 15–20% of owners and leaders actually think about long-term prospects and growth. How do you look ahead to your company’s future and start working on strategic plans? One effective tool for this is the strategic session. We talked with a strategy expert about how this tool works and what makes it distinctive.

— Alexander, you’ve said that the tougher the market conditions, the more interest there is in strategic sessions. How do you explain that?

— It’s true — in 2022, over just six months, I spent around 60 days working as a consultant on strategic sessions for different companies. That’s a record for me, across nearly 30 years in the field. It matters to recognise that businesses were genuinely facing challenges of this kind for the first time. Many companies, in that situation, poured all their effort into pure survival — hence the firefighting, the plans that only stretch a month ahead at most, and the hope that things would somehow resolve themselves. But around 15–20% of companies still looked ahead and set themselves genuinely ambitious goals. And the strategic session is exactly the tool that lets you answer even the toughest questions.

— What kind of questions are we talking about here?

— These are questions that reflect a business’s core pain points. For some, they’re fairly general: what action to take given the current situation, how to get back to growth, where to find new ideas, how to even start thinking about the business’s prospects, and so on.

A lot of questions get much more specific:

Companies that already had a strategy in place are now revisiting it. And even when the strategy itself still holds up, the way it’s implemented often needs a fresh approach, given how much the conditions have changed.

— Let’s start with a definition: what actually is a strategic session?

— I like to put it this way: it’s a group format that allows the company’s leaders to come together and develop strategic decisions that genuinely matter for the business. I want to stress: we’re talking about strategic decisions here, not operational ones, and not tactical ones either. And one more important point: a strategic session is collective, group work — it’s what lets you actually draw on the potential and the real strengths of an organisation’s key people.

I’d highlight several core tasks that a strategic session is meant to accomplish::

To put it simply, strategic sessions deal with questions tied to the business’s development. Operational and tactical matters don’t belong here — there are other formats for those.

Of course, you can’t tackle all of these tasks in a single session — you need to genuinely assess what’s realistic.

Beyond the core tasks, a strategic session can also address secondary ones. For example: building a shared information base for the management team, getting them aligned around a single goal, building group working skills, increasing the engagement of key employees in the business’s development. But it matters to remember that these are secondary goals, not the primary ones.

— How much time does a strategic session actually take? What needs to be considered when preparing for one?

— Depending on the core goals, a session can take anywhere from half a day to 2–4 days. To actually build a full strategy, you’ll need an entire series of sessions.

First and foremost, you need to define the goals — otherwise nothing that follows actually makes sense. After that, you build the script for the session, and it’s important to consider exactly who’s in the room: what their relationships are like, how they interact, what their psychological dynamics are. At this point, you also decide which tools you’ll need during the session. The next step is to set the timing and realistically assess whether the goals can actually be met within it. Once the session wraps up, you need to capture the results and agree on the action plan going forward. Throughout both the preparation and the session itself, one of the key roles belongs to the facilitator* — the person on whom the success of the group’s communication genuinely depends.

— Is this an external specialist, or someone working inside the company? What’s actually required of them?

— It can be either an internal or an external specialist. What matters is that the facilitator shouldn’t be too dependent on the client. And if the company is actually building a strategy or working through strategic problems, the facilitator genuinely needs solid experience in shaping strategy — and not a small amount of it. They also need a track record of running strategic sessions. On top of that, they need a real understanding of how business actually works, knowledge of the main trends in the client’s market, the ability to quickly pick up the team’s professional language, and the skill to put the right questions to participants at exactly the right moment.

With nearly 30 years in consulting, I’ll add this: if you can bring in a consultant who actually helps companies solve management problems — particularly around strategy — to act as the facilitator, that’s genuinely the best possible option.

With nearly 30 years in consulting, I’ll add this: if you can bring in a consultant who actually helps companies solve management problems — particularly around strategy — to act as the facilitator, that’s genuinely the best possible option.

— Let’s talk about why a facilitator actually needs expertise. How does that play out during the session itself? 

— It’s pretty obvious, really. Imagine a management team discussing decisions worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, with major investment and serious market share on the line. Who would an owner or senior executive actually trust to guide that team toward shared understanding and the right decisions? Say we’re talking about a top Premier League team. Who would you hand it to — a golf coach, an amateur football player, or a professional manager who’s already won titles in that league? There’s really no contest. But ultimately, it’s the client who decides who they trust to steer the business toward a multimillion-dollar future.

Let me give you an example. A company owner decided to run a strategic session to get the team aligned on a strategic project, clearly define the goals and objectives, and build an implementation plan. A team-building specialist was suggested as facilitator. Yes, this person had solid experience running working groups. But what the client ended up with, instead of a strategic session, was a vivid, genuinely memorable team-building event. As for the actual objectives, there’s really not much to say: a huge list of tasks, loosely connected at best, with no sense of priority or how they’d actually get implemented. I’ve also seen highly experienced, genuinely skilled sales or marketing consultants run strategic sessions as facilitators. The outcome of those events: plenty of ideas about sales or marketing, but almost nothing about strategy or the business’s actual development.

If all you need is a list of ideas, a straightforward brainstorm, then a facilitator without specific expertise is perfectly fine. But when you’re talking about building a strategy, or stress-testing a business model, you need real expertise and the right competencies — to ask the kinds of questions that strip the team of its rose-tinted glasses.

— How can a client actually tell whether someone is genuinely a strong facilitator?

— We’ve already talked about the need for expertise. The next step is to find out how many hours of strategic sessions this specialist actually has under their belt, discuss the proposed script, and gauge how quickly they can get up to speed on the specifics of the business. You can ask for contact details of past clients to ask about results directly. As for me, I don’t wait to be asked — I give every potential client the contact details of owners and senior executives who’ve brought me in to run strategic sessions at their companies over the past year or two. It matters that the client genuinely trusts their facilitator — after all, we’re talking about the company’s future, about its strategy.

— How often do you see companies making mistakes preparing for or running these sessions? Can you highlight the most common ones?

— Yes, mistakes happen, and that’s perfectly normal. But if you know what you might run into, you have a genuine chance of avoiding many of the difficult moments. Let me run through the classic ones.

— It’s clear that running a strategic session requires serious resources, experience, and expertise…

— You’re right. Before the session, you need genuinely thorough preparation: gather the data, set up meetings with experts, draw up the list of trends that could either push the strategy forward or constrain it. I find it strange when an owner or executive is dreaming of a multimillion-dollar business but isn’t willing to invest the resources — money, time, and so on — to get there. If you want that future, you have to put in real work right here, right now.