Skelar is a venture builder growing a dozen tech companies at once, with a team of more than 1,300 people and no shortage of ambition. You’d think that if anyone had strategy sorted, it would be them.
But there’s a paradox every ambitious company runs into sooner or later: the faster you grow, the more operational thinking crowds out strategic thinking. You can lose sight of all three horizons at once, and start managing from ‘the pit’ instead of from ‘orbit’.
That’s exactly why Skelar came to us: they’re used to playing the long game and staying a step ahead. We ran a corporate workshop for their team: ‘Strategy work that can shift your perspective’.
What did we do over a day and a half?
We dived deep into different approaches to strategy. Then we moved to the practical side: we worked on Skelar’s future through McKinsey’s three horizons of growth, talked through the finer points of the North Star, and unpacked the signals that tell you when it’s time to stop and ‘reload’ the vision.
Participants ran their own Strategic Health Check© on how viable their system is and sketched out a draft of a ‘living’ vision.
The key principle we teach: strategy isn’t a 200-page document gathering dust on a shelf, but an ongoing process of shaping ideas ahead of the curve and putting them into practice. With a readiness for radical optionality.
Why does this matter right now?
The founders and CEOs we work with can put strategy work off ‘until later’. While growth is still roaring. While there’s no time. While everything’s going well anyway.
But there’s a question worth asking yourself today: does your team share a common language about the future? Not targets in Jira, but a shared sense of who you’ll be in five years and why the company should exist at all. Which business model to play in, and which to walk away from?
The most common feedback from participants: ‘We’ve started asking ourselves questions we never asked before’.