What the problem is
A strategic plan can be impeccably written and still not choose what the organisation prioritises when two legitimate options rule each other out.
It happens often: the plan is written, approved and published; and when the leadership team is then put in front of the choices that plan should have settled (grow or consolidate, centralise or distribute, exploit what already works or explore what is new), what comes up most often is the middle ground. Ambivalence is then presented as balance, it sounds reasonable and nobody loses anything, but the cost arrives later, and by two routes:
- What is not decided deliberately ends up being decided by the budget: the instrument that hands out the money sets the real priorities, and it does so without any deliberation.
- A deployment built on a strategy that has not chosen produces technically impeccable work on the wrong question.
To contrast is to force that choice while the people who govern can still make it.
What a contrast is
To contrast is to set what the organisation thinks of itself against what its strategy declares and what its budget prioritises. Three sources that are almost never read together, and the distance between them is where all the value sits.
It is worth drawing the boundaries, because the word is used for very different things. A contrast does not audit, does not take minutes of the session and does not amend the strategic process the organisation already has under way; nor does it bring an alternative plan written from outside, because someone arriving from outside does not know the institution better than the people who govern it.
- SOURCE 1What it thinks of itselfA real-time questionnaire on the dilemmas: where each member of the leadership team stands when they have to choose for real. Anonymous and aggregated, because that is the condition for the positions nobody states out loud in front of the chief executive to appear at all.
- SOURCE 2What it declaresThe strategic plan, the priorities and the commitments made to the board, the shareholders or the community, read looking for the choices they leave unresolved.
- SOURCE 3What it actually prioritisesThe budget and the multi-year investment plan, the approved project portfolio, how people are allocated, the objectives and incentives of senior management, and the agenda of the committee. This is where strategy becomes verifiable: whoever hands out the money, the time and the people is setting the real priorities.
The four patterns a contrast looks for
These are the patterns that come up most often when those three sources are crossed in a large, deliberative organisation.
- The neutral positionFaced with a list of dilemmas, the organisation sits in the middle on most of them. Where there is a clear position, it was set by last year's budget cycle, without anyone having deliberated over it.
- The choice with no leverWhen it finally chooses, the organisation chooses the demanding option. And the money stays where it was: the investment, the dedicated team and senior management's annual objectives all point at the business that already works, while the newly chosen priority arrives with no budget line, no people and nobody accountable for it. Until it enters the budget cycle and the objectives table, the choice is only a statement.
- The outsourced decision"It depends on the market", "head office decides that", "we have to listen to everyone", "the regulations already cover it". Each formula is defensible on its own; together they draw a pattern of deferring the decision that belongs to you, and there is always a part of the problem that is under the organisation's own control.
- The gap in the "who" columnThe organisation deliberates well and assigns ownership badly. The difficulty does not show up in the diagnosis or in the actions: it shows up on reaching the name of the person responsible, above all when the decision crosses two directorates or two business units. And that flaw at the source is not fixed afterwards with data.
How it is done
The engagement has a fixed core (prior analysis, working day, report) and an optional foresight session. The sequence stays the same from one organisation to the next; what changes are the dilemmas it is made to choose between.
- Prior analysis and building the dilemmasBack-office work on the documentation the organisation provides: strategy documents, planning, investment… and the organisation's real position is placed on a short list of dilemmas built for it. That analysis is the mirror against which everything the sessions produce will later be read.
- Opening sessionThe starting frame and a contrast of the work already done. This is where the distance between what the organisation declares and what it actually prioritises is put on the table, before anyone starts proposing.
- Tables by dilemmaRotating rounds, with a fixed host at each table, so that every participant passes through all of them. Each table is asked for the same three things: take a position on its dilemma, propose two or three actions with an owner, and say what piece of data or what decision is missing before anyone can act.
- Closing sessionSharing back to the full room and open discussion of the specific proposals. This is where you see whether the room will say out loud what it wrote at the table.
- Analysis and impact proposalThe back-office work: crossing what the tables produced with the plan, with the budget and with the positions declared on the dilemmas, and turning it into ordered priorities, which is a different job from transcribing what was said.
- Foresight session · optionalWhen the engagement includes it, it is applied to the priorities the working day has chosen. It is not opened until the decisions the day left open are closed: building scenarios on top of an ownership deficit does not fix it, it amplifies it.
- A block of hours for the deploymentAn agreed number of hours of availability afterwards to support the deployment: internal validation, review of drafting, and answers to whatever comes up once the document starts moving around the organisation.
The foresight session
This is the optional part of the service and the most elaborate. What builds the scenarios is the joint analysis and the debate among the people in the room: the conversation is the work. A console of my own holds it up underneath (everyone answers from their phone, results are projected on the spot and nothing is tied to identified individuals), and that brings speed, anonymity and a real-time reading of where the group is heading. The route has seven blocks.
- Focal question and systemWhat decision the foresight work is about, and over what horizon. Without this, scenarios are literature.
- Environment and forcesForces of change sorted by domain, weak signals that look marginal today, and rules of the sector that could break (with the cause of the break and the place where it would show first). Out of this comes the list of what can be taken as predetermined.
- Critical uncertaintiesThe uncertainties are collected phrased as neutral variables ("degree of centralisation in decision-making", not "excessive centralisation"), then grouped, voted on and placed on an impact-by-uncertainty map.
- Scenario architectureTwo axes and four quadrants. The axes are chosen in the preparation, against a hard criterion a vote would not know how to apply: they have to be independent of each other, or the four quadrants end up being two. The group supplies the raw material; the axes are chosen and defended.
- The workshopThe room splits into four groups, one per scenario, with a rapporteur who writes down what the group agrees. Each group builds the narrative of its scenario and its implications, separating what would serve to prevent it from what would serve to mitigate it: they are not the same question, and put together in one box people skip the second.
- RobustnessWind tunnelling: every strategic option is scored across the four scenarios, from damaging to highly valuable. What holds up in all four is what can be decided today. The rest is a bet, and it is worth knowing that it is one.
- Priority and the cost of waitingA hundred units of resource shared out across the options, an order of priority for the next twelve to twenty-four months, and one question that orders everything else: which decision would be most costly to postpone.
The early warning watch board
It is the final part of the workshop and the part that decides whether any of the rest is worth anything. The room identifies observable signals attached to each scenario, and a few of them are adopted (five or six, not fifteen). Each one comes out with six columns:
- IndicatorExactly what is being watched.
- ScenarioWhich of the four it is a signal of. Without that attribution, the board is a wish list.
- ThresholdThe value at which a review of the strategy is triggered. Not "if it gets worse": a number.
- Who watches itA first name and a surname.
- ReviewA date in the calendar, not a generic frequency.
- Status todayA traffic light, so there is a snapshot of the day it was agreed.
The demand is in the first column. A signal has to be something you can look at without arguing about it: a figure, a third party's decision, a change in price. "Uncertainty is increasing" is not a signal.
And it is worth saying what this board does not do. It does not watch anything by itself: it is a snapshot of the day of the workshop, an indicator changes status because somebody goes in and changes it, and nobody reopens a workshop session five months later.
The only things that survive are the two columns on the right (the owner and the review date), and they survive in that person's diary, not in a tool. If nobody leaves the room with a date in the committee's calendar, the board is an ornament. I would rather say so here than sell it as an alert system it is not.
What comes out of a contrast
- An analysis and impact proposal reportIt gathers what the sessions produced, sets it against the plan, the budget and the positions declared on the dilemmas, and orders the result into priorities. It also states, explicitly, what it does not resolve and why.
- The map of the four scenariosWith their names, their taglines and their revised narrative, in a format that projects in the room.
- The robustness matrixWhich options hold up across all four futures and which only work in one.
- The watch boardWith an owner and a review date on every line.
- The risks of not actingOrdered by how soon they arrive, not by how serious they are: which window closes first.
- A draft of the projects that pullThe chosen priorities, already written up as projects: name, description, strategic rationale, general and specific objectives, domain and scope, main lines of work, governance, indicators, milestones and final impact. It is a declared draft (the organisation makes it concrete and scales it), but it leaves the work done up to the point where it can be argued about.
- The traceability into what comes nextWhat material from this work feeds each later phase of the process, and what is needed from the organisation for it to pay off.
All of the above leaves the room in a single document.
What makes it different
It crosses three sources, not one
Almost all the strategy contrast on the market compares a strategy with itself. The value is in crossing it with what the organisation believes about itself and with what it actually pays for.
It works on the organisation's own material
The later sessions do not start from generic frameworks but from the material the organisation itself produced. That is what makes it recognise itself in the result instead of filing it away.
There are questions I do not answer
Deciding whether an organisation centralises or distributes is a function of governance, not of advice. The contrast points at the decision, argues why it is the most decisive one, and leaves it where it belongs.
Collective intelligence is the mechanism
An imposed direction holds for as long as senior management is paying attention; one built by the people who will have to carry it stays, because they own it.
It does not interrupt the organisation's own process
If the organisation already has its strategic plan under way, the contrast does not amend it: it puts it under tension and hands back material for the phases that follow.
What did not come out gets said
If a table named no owners or put no figure to what it proposed, the report says so in those words. A deliverable that smooths over the gaps is a deliverable that passes them on intact to the next phase.
Who it works for
- Industry and corporationsFrom the mid-sized company with an advisory board to the group with several business units. When the board or the leadership team needs an external reading with no internal agenda before committing investment, or when the organisation exploits what it already has very well and has lost the habit of exploring.
- Universities and R&D centresWhen a strategic plan is being written or has just been approved and it is worth knowing whether it really chooses before it is deployed.
- Public administrationWhen the declared strategy and the budget instrument that funds it are not pointing at the same place.
- Alliances and consortiaWhen several institutions have to agree on a common direction and each one arrives with its own.
How it is contracted
What your organisation brings
- The team that decidesThe whole leadership team, not a delegation. The session does not work if the person who can close what gets opened is not in the room.
- The real documentationThe strategic plan and whatever shows where the money, the time and the people go: budget, investment plan, project portfolio and senior management's objectives. Without the second half, the contrast is half a reading.
- Few days, and full onesOne or several depending on the scope, and more than one if foresight is included. Full days, because what comes out of a blank sheet in two hours is generalities. But between one and the next there is no steering committee, no progress meetings and no homework for the leadership team: that work is mine. The process is light and barely invasive of senior management's diaries, on purpose.
- Access to the blocking dataThe data the contrast itself identifies as essential in order to decide. There are usually few of them and they usually exist.
- A willingness to read what was not decidedThe report names the gaps. That is the product, not a side effect.
How it is agreed
Scope and terms are settled in a preliminary conversation, based on the size of the organisation, the number of sessions, and whether the contrast stops at the working day or chains on to the phases that follow. Every engagement is quoted on that basis.