STRAAD partnered with the client’s CEO and executive leadership team, and activated our 5D approach. Our engagement began with discovery, where STRAAD facilitated one-on-one interviews with the executive leadership team, hosted a kick-off session, and collected and documented additional insights on the existing strategic and leadership capabilities and overall health of the organization.

Our comprehensive discovery process moved STRAAD to our second D – diagnosis. STRAAD compiled and themed findings from the discovery phase and tested hypotheses against the outputs. Most importantly, STRAAD aligned with the CEO on a diagnosis of which organizational levers would not only help them achieve their near-term desired strategic planning outcomes, but also support successful implementation and execution in the long term.

While the client had articulated the need for strategy development and implementation support, STRAAD’s thorough discovery also unveiled three additional diagnoses within the system:

1. Executives who were both newly appointed and those who had been in role for several years were in the early stages of building their integrated strategic planning skills.
2. Critical resources to improve organizational performance, including communications and strategic change management, were limited in both capability and capacity.
3. There was no clear leadership model at the enterprise level, and while the desire to make shifts to build a learning and performance culture to unlock high performance was top of mind for the CEO, several functions had additional organizational effectiveness needs requiring immediate attention. These included developing a refreshed operating model and addressing team effectiveness challenges.

To ensure executive leaders and the CEO received bespoke support, STRAAD moved into the third D – design. STRAAD designed customized support models and a recurring series of virtual and in-person working sessions over the course of 10 months. This fit-for-purpose design ensured activities were suitable for execution in a hybrid working environment, with thoughtful consideration of which high-priority elements would benefit most from our in-person working opportunities. Ensuring all insights from the discovery and diagnosis were addressed, STRAAD also designed an approach to work with individual VPs to create additional organizational performance solutions in support of their unique functional needs beyond strategy.

STRAAD’s fourth D – delivery – moved the client to execution and implementation. STRAAD supported 14 business units in designing functional-level strategies and 3-year execution plans. To address one of the key presenting problems – siloed operations – STRAAD facilitated cross-functional integration conversations and consolidated all outputs into an integrated plan that aligned all leaders and teams and provided consistent direction.

In parallel, STRAAD led the executive leadership team through enterprise-level strategy articulation, core process definition, enterprise capability assessment, and shared service relationship navigation. The STRAAD team rounded out our support with bespoke recommendations on change management, communications, and leadership models to enable strategy execution and foster a culture centred on performance, learning and continuous improvement.