Key Takeaways from The Strategy Design Festival
In January, we gathered a room of civil society leaders, organisers and strategists for the very first Strategy Design Festival in London. It was a day to step away from the day‑to‑day and ask a simple but unsettling question: What if we treated strategy less like a document and more like a living practice?
If you’ve ever struggled to connect your day‑to‑day task list to your strategy, you’re not alone. Across the day, which were mostly spent in small working sessions, a handful of themes kept surfacing about why that gap exists – and what it takes to close it. These are the threads that resonated most with people in the room, and they’re now shaping what we’re doing next.
1. Everyone’s definition of “strategy” is based on their realities
We opened by asking people to share how they currently define “strategy”, in theory and in practice. Some described it as “a clear route from here to there,” others as “how we choose what not to do,” and some admitted that strategy mostly meant “a plan the board asked for that nobody has time to read.”
What struck us was not that people disagreed, but that those differences reflected their realities: funder pressures, governance expectations, and the very real constraints organisations are under. When your days are dominated by fire‑fighting, strategy can feel like a luxury – or worse, an additional burden.
One of the Festival’s quiet achievements was providing the space to surface those tensions. By the end of the day, a shared thread was emerging: strategy as an ongoing organisational conversation about purpose, power and choices, not a one‑off product.
2. Theories of change are useful – until they float away from practice.
In the late morning, we explored the relationship between theories of change and strategic goals. Many participants arrived with a familiar frustration: they had a polished theory of change on paper, but struggled to see how it shaped real decisions about programmes, advocacy or resourcing.
Two things became clear. First, when theories of change are treated as compliance artefacts (for funders, boards, or consultants), they quickly drift away from the messy realities in which staff and communities work. And second, they stop being useful the moment they become so complicated that no one truly understands them, or staff can’t hold them in their heads during daily decisions – beautiful diagrams that don’t actually guide choices.
When we use them as living hypotheses – something to test, adapt and argue with – they become energising again. The most powerful moments came when people started asking, “If this is really our theory of change, what would we stop doing? What would we try that feels risky but necessary?” Those questions turned abstract diagrams into strategic choices, and strategy back into something people do together
3. Strategy is always about power, whether we name it or not
Throughout the Festival, questions of power kept bubbling up: Who gets to set the agenda for strategy? Whose data and stories define “the problem”? Whose risks count?
In sessions on stakeholder engagement, narrative and governance, we saw versions of the same pattern: strategy processes that concentrated power in a small group – a board, senior team or external expert – even in organisations deeply committed to participation and equity. When we introduced an exercise on shifting power in the strategic planning process, people quickly recognised organisational and systemic problems
It became obvious that how we design strategy can either reinforce existing hierarchies or open up small but important shifts: who is in the room, who frames the questions, who decides what “success” looks like. One of our biggest takeaways: if we don’t intentionally design for power‑shifting, strategy will default to power‑preserving, both internally and in the wider world.
4. The real work is keeping strategy alive between meetings
If there was one phrase that travelled through multiple sessions, it was this: “We don’t need another strategy that sits on a shelf.”
The breakouts on learning, adaptation and “threat modelling” made it clear that participants want lightweight, repeatable rhythms – short reflection loops, simple decision rubrics, regular check‑ins – that keep strategy connected to real‑time choices. People shared practices like:
- Monthly “strategy huddles” that review 2–3 key questions, not a full plan.
- Using simple criteria (“does this move us toward our strategic priorities?”) to triage opportunities and distractions.
- Stress‑testing plans against plausible shocks: funding cuts, political shifts, staff turnover, or backlash.
The hunger wasn’t for more sophisticated frameworks, but for time, structure and permission to simplify and actually use the ones they already have. Strategy, in other words, needs to show up in everyday decisions, not just staff retreats.
5. People don’t just want tools – they want peers
Finally, the most consistent piece of feedback was about the people in the room. The Festival brought together organisations of different sizes, geographies and missions, but with strikingly similar tensions: limited capacity, complex accountability, and a desire to be values‑aligned in practice, not just in language.
What participants valued most wasn’t a new canvas or method, but the chance to hear “Oh, you’re wrestling with that too” – and to steal ideas shamelessly from each other. The closing circle surfaced a shared wish: more time in smaller groups, with continuity, to dig into their own strategy challenges together.
That wish is exactly what’s now shaping the next step.
What’s next: a Strategy Design Cohort
Out of these reflections, we’re developing a 6‑week online Strategy Design Cohort for UK‑based NGOs, charities and civil society organisations. It will build directly on the Festival’s themes: strategy as a living practice, power‑aware process design, and stress‑testing in uncertain times.
We’ll work with a small group to turn big ideas into concrete habits: turning your theory of change into simple decision tests, redesigning who is in your next strategy conversation, and setting up regular “strategy huddles” that fit your real constraints. In the next posts, I’ll dive deeper into two of the threads above: what it means to treat theories of change as living hypotheses, and how we can use power analysis to redesign our strategy processes.
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