Strategy Is Hard – and Even Harder in Isolation

Final Takeaways from the Strategy Design Festival

Across the Strategy Design Festival, one message kept surfacing in quiet conversations over breaks and in the closing circle: the hardest strategy work isn’t the frameworks – it’s doing it without feeling alone.

On paper, most organisations have access to plenty of tools: theories of change, canvases, logframes, OKRs, and strategic plans. In practice, people kept saying some version of: “We kind of know what we should be doing on strategy – we just don’t have the time, space or support to actually do it.” What made the Festival feel different for many wasn’t a magic new template. It was being in a room where people could say “Oh, you’re wrestling with that too” and mean it.

When strategy happens in isolation, it usually means a small group making decisions on behalf of everyone else. Staff, communities and partners are then invited to “buy in”, rather than to shape the questions or own the answers. If strategy is going to live beyond a document, that ownership needs to be shared.

This final post in the series is about that need for peers and solidarity, not just tools – and how, in a competitive culture, resisting organisational isolation and sharing strategy with stakeholders is itself part of the work. It also shares how that’s shaping the Strategy Design Cohort that starts this week.

Why tools aren’t enough

If you work in an NGO, charity or grassroots organisation, you probably don’t have a shortage of frameworks. You may already have:

A theory of change diagram.
A multi‑year strategy document.
Planning templates, KPIs, dashboards and reporting cycles.

Those can all be useful. The problem is that tools don’t do the work for you. They don’t sit next to you when you’re:

Choosing between two imperfect funding opportunities.
Deciding whether to pause a project that’s busy but not really strategic.
Navigating tension between what the board wants and what staff or communities are asking for.

Most strategy dilemmas are not “Which tool should we use?” but “How do we work through this, in this context, with these people and constraints?” That’s where peers matter.

The real work is not just choosing the right framework. It is figuring out how to bring the people who are closest to the work and its impacts into the strategy conversation, so they can share ownership of the choices you make.

Competing in a system that wants you isolated

We’re also swimming in a wider culture that treats strategy as a competitive game. Capitalism tells organisations they are in a race for profile, funding and credit, so it’s no surprise that many end up doing strategy in isolation – watching “competitors”, guarding ideas, and trying to win on their own. That might make sense in a market, but it works against social change.

If we want to shift systems, we need to resist that pull, look for places to connect across issues, share what we’re learning, and build practical solidarity instead. Resisting that competitive pull is also about who is in the room: when staff, communities and partners are part of the strategy work, it becomes harder to treat other organisations as rivals and easier to see where you can align, support each other and act in solidarity.

The Strategy Design Festival gave us a glimpse of what that looks like in practice – organisations working on different issues and in different geographies, naming similar tensions and freely stealing ideas from each other. The Strategy Design Cohort is one way of making that kind of cross‑organisational solidarity a regular habit.

The relief of “Oh, it’s not just us”

At the Festival, we had organisations of different sizes, geographies and missions in the same room, but the tensions they named were strikingly similar:

Limited capacity and constant firefighting.
Pressure from funders and boards for clear plans in very unclear times.
A desire to be values‑aligned in practice, not just in language.

What many people valued most wasn’t a new methodology; it was the relief of hearing others say, “We’re stuck there too.” The closing circle surfaced a shared wish: more time in smaller groups, with continuity, to dig into their own strategy challenges together.

That experience matters because isolation distorts strategy. When you’re working through big decisions in a small internal bubble, it’s easy to:

Over‑personalise organisational problems (“maybe we’re just bad at this”).
Assume everyone else has it sorted.
Talk yourselves out of needed changes because you’ve never seen them done differently.

Peers don’t remove the difficulty, but they make it more honest and less lonely.

Why peers matter even more in uncertain times

When this series started, the context already felt uncertain. Since then, a major new war has broken out, and its ripple effects are being felt in economies, funding landscapes and communities far beyond the immediate conflict. The ground many organisations are standing on has shifted again.

In moments like this, the temptation is to pull strategy into a smaller and smaller circle – to “protect” decisions at the top until things stabilise. But uncertainty is also exactly when we most need honest reflection, multiple perspectives and a bit of collective sense‑making. Peers can’t make the world more predictable, but they can help you:

Notice patterns and risks earlier, because you’re hearing from different contexts.
Discern what’s really changing versus what just feels overwhelming.
Make more grounded choices about where to hold the line, where to adapt, and what to let go of.

Peers don’t remove uncertainty. They help you stay oriented in the middle of it.

What peer support can do that tools can’t

So what does a good peer space add, beyond another workshop or training? A few things we heard – and have seen – make it possible:

Naming the real dilemmas. It’s easier to say “our board is risk‑averse” or “our theory of change doesn’t actually guide decisions” when you’re in a room of people facing similar dynamics. That honesty is the starting point for useful strategy work.
Stealing ideas with permission. People left the Festival with practices they’d borrowed unapologetically from others – monthly strategy huddles, different ways of involving staff, simple decision tests – because they’d seen them working in organisations like theirs.
Testing moves before you take them home. Peer spaces let you rehearse conversations you need to have with boards, leadership teams or colleagues, and refine the framing before you’re “on stage”.
Staying with the work over time. Strategy is a practice, not an event. A group that meets repeatedly over weeks or months can come back to the same knot, notice what’s shifted, and adjust together.

In short, tools give you language and structure. Peers give you courage, perspective and accountability – and, crucially, a way to practice solidarity with stakeholders and other organisations instead of defaulting to competition.

How this shaped the Strategy Design cohort (starting this week)

All of this is why we designed Strategy Design: a small peer cohort for civil society leaders, not just a training course. It starts this week, and there are still a few spots left, with groups meeting at 10:00 and 16:00 UK to support people in different time zones.

The cohort is for people leading or holding a strategy in NGOs, charities and grassroots organisations who want:

Space to work on real strategic challenges in these very uncertain times.
A small group of peers who understand the pressures of civil society.
Practical support to turn strategy into a living, staff‑owned practice.

The cohort is not just about your own role as a strategist. It is about designing ways for your staff, communities and partners to shape strategy with you – building simple practices that move strategy from something done for stakeholders to something done with them.

Across the programme, we will:

Turn your theory of change into 3–5 simple decision tests that can guide day‑to‑day choices.
Design strategy rhythms (huddles, check‑ins, stress‑tests) that fit your capacity and context.
Map where power currently sits in your strategy processes and identify small but real shifts you can make.
Support each other to try things between sessions and come back to reflect honestly on what happened.

It’s also a chance to step out of the competitive logic that keeps organisations isolated. Over six online sessions, we bring together participants from organisations working on different issues and in different geographies, so they can think together, learn from each other, and design strategies and practices that are less competitive and more collective.

You bring your context and dilemmas; the cohort brings structure, questions, peers and facilitation to keep you moving.

You can read more and apply here (and, if you’re quick, still join this round):
https://www.fabriders.net/strategy-design-a-cohort-for-civil-society-leaders/[3]

Where this series leaves us – and what’s next

Across this series, we’ve argued that:

Strategy is a verb, not a document.
Your theory of change isn’t really a theory until you treat it as a living hypothesis.
Strategy is ALWAYS about power, including the power dynamics inside your organisation.
Keeping strategy alive and real depends on simple, staff‑owned rhythms.
And you don’t need just tools – you need peers, stakeholders and solidarity.

Shared ownership of strategy does not happen by accident. It comes from deliberately refusing to do strategy in isolation – and instead creating regular, structured ways for stakeholders and peers to shape where you go next.

If this series has surfaced live strategy questions for you, but a cohort isn’t the right fit right now, there’s another option. FabRiders also works directly with organisations to design and facilitate bespoke strategy processes – the kind that treat strategy as a verb, surface power dynamics, and build collective power across teams and partners. We’ll share more soon about what that looks like and how FabRiders can support your next strategy process.

In the meantime, you might still ask: where are the 3–4 people, inside or outside your organisation, who could be your “strategy peers” – and what would it take to gather them regularly, in resistance to the competitive stories we’re all told?

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