Strategic planning and decision-making support - Owen Morris Partnership Strategic consultants and facilitators

Supporting boards, CEOs and managers with strategic thinking and making the decisions that matter

Strategy is key to leadership. But it’s not easy. It can take time and get complex, without any perfect answers or certainty of success. That’s where we come in – as strategic consultants and facilitators.

We help leaders with both strategic thinking and making strategic choices. Not only about strategy for an organisation as a whole, but equally for more focused or operational issues where systematic and longer-term thinking is important.

Clearer and wider thinking. Better and more confident decisions

We act as an external ‘thinking partner‘ for leaders, helping to provide extra space, objectivity and structured support with looking at strategic challenges. We can apply the many years’ experience we have across dozens of sector and many different types of strategic situation.

Our approach is always practical and designed to work closely with your team. Our support is there right through the decision-making process – from exploring the problem to shaping the final decision. We bring tools and frameworks to help open up new ideas and different perspectives. We can help with collecting and analysing data and run targeted workshops. We work with individual managers as well as the whole team.

Organisational-level strategic planning

We can help you develop, review or refresh organisation-level strategies and plans. We offer support along the whole strategic planning process, including:

Market/external and internal strategic assessment
Stakeholder consultations
Definition of purpose, vision, values and long-term goals
Choices of business scope, competitive positioning and business/operating model
Strategic options assessment and selection
Deciding on organisational structure, capabilities, resourcing and systems needs
Implementation planning – challenges, risks, performance targets, reporting processes

We’ll bring, of course, expertise in a range of research, survey, analytical, creative and planning tools and methods. If your industry is particularly fast-moving, we can support you in adopting broad ‘strategic frameworks’ rather than detailed, traditional multi-year plans.

Management and operational strategies and plans

Alongside organisation-level choices, we can assist managers with decisions in more focused, operational areas, such as:

Product, market or business-sector strategies – including NPD and market entry decisions
Functional, divisional or department-level plans e.g. marketing, sales, production
Organisational and people – for example, culture, training and reward strategies
Leadership practices and policies
Change initiatives and project planning
Management and IT systems

Strategic facilitation

To help make decisions, group discussion – including focus groups, workshops and away-days – can often play a useful role – for collecting information, opinions and ideas, as well as assessing options and reaching consensus on solutions and choices.

In our experience as facilitators, structured team discussion can particularly help where:

the situation is complex and needs more careful thinking together
team members are holding quite different views and there is little alignment
there is not enough radical or innovative thinking in the team
ideas and conversations have become stuck or unproductive

Coaching for ad-hoc strategic or performance issues

Of course, even with strategies and plans in place, the world never stands still and unexpected challenges or problems appear. Like the need to respond to an unexpected move by a major competitor, or the need to make major adjustments to a failing change programme.

So, we provide tailored, focused support for individual managers or teams who could use a neutral, helping hand or ‘sounding board’ to discuss, resolve or handle particular, ‘live’ strategic or leadership issues, challenges or projects in their jobs.

We emphasize a positive and practical ‘solutions-focused‘ support approach, helping managers focus on future desired outcomes, consider issues objectively and creatively, and identifying options for moving forward that often build on or improve on what they do today.

Strategic consultants and facilitators – for the professional support you need

Strategic choices are amongst the most important, but difficult, tasks of leadership.

But, by working with us, we’ll make the whole process easier and more straightforward. So you can make choices with more confidence and get on with achieving the results you want!

Start a conversation with us!