Strategy Design Workshop

The Strategic Conversation™ process is a 2nd Road LLP product that helps teams and organisations work collaboratively to develop strategic vision, shared intent and goals, common language, and then set forth with an active plan for accomplishing the strategy. It is a process that demands direct participation by clients and can only be successful when they are driving their own creative process. The process is not about traditional strategic planning, which usually has more to do with budgetary extrapolation and 12-month horizons. It is about using a design approach to create powerful and imaginative vision for a desired future and to create a coherent argument to capture and communicate that strategy within an organisation.


One example is a national-level social policy organisation charged with drafting and pursuing new policy on behalf of one of Australia’s cultural communities. Members of the group included community leaders from around the nation, many of whom had never attempted to work together before and who brought different interests and priorities to the table. The group sought out a strategic conversation to help them find common ground, establish a meaningful shared narrative, and identify clear priorities in outlining a vision for the future of their cultural community in Australia.


In this instance, some of the most difficult work for the group was in using conversation to minimise perceived differences between different subgroups and special interests, especially because this community had not been heard or respected at the national level, and the community had long suffered from a lack of coherence. A major outcome of this Strategic Conversation was to help the group establish 3-, 5- and 10-year horizons and also to begin to establish a shared language around their priorities.


The Strategic Conversation process is led by a facilitator and supported by one or more designers, who capture and visualise the conversation as a designing event. The conversation and shared thinking are crystallised into a visual form that captures the collaboration and provides the building blocks for further concept generation prototyping. In this way, strategy is co-created and co-owned by all of the participants.


As a consultant at 2nd Road, I participated in dozens of these types of formal strategy design workshops, involving a wide range of organisations.  What this work demonstrates is that design offers a powerful set of approaches for leadership in organisations. Treating strategy as a designable product—one that can be empowered by a creative process and that benefits from a systematic approach—allows organisations to liberate themselves from the status quo. Furthermore, using design thinking and methods to create strategy ensures that the result is visionary and yet grounded in plans that can be realistically enacted and fulfilled.

Portfolio > Strategy & Planning > Strategic Conversation

Client: Business, Government, and Public Policy Organisations, Australia


My Role: Design Consultant