Something we keep coming back to: the leaders who navigate change best aren't the ones with the clearest plan. They're the ones who stay readable to their teams when things get uncertain.

'We need a new strategy' is sometimes true. More often, the strategy is fine and the organisation just hasn't been built to carry it. Worth checking which one you actually have.

A lot of our early conversations aren't about strategy at all. They're about what's making it hard to move. You have to clear that before anything else lands.

Most leaders we meet know exactly what needs to change. The gap isn't insight, it's the conditions to act on it. That's a different problem to solve.

Strategy doesn't stall in the boardroom. It stalls in the conversation nobody wanted to have three months earlier. That's the work.

Bad strategy rarely fails at execution. It fails when the assumptions shaping it go unchallenged in the leadership team or boardroom. #badstrategy

The senior leaders we work with rarely lack good ideas. What they're navigating is an organisation that's structurally set up to resist those ideas. Strategy is easy. Permission structures are not.

'Alignment' is the most overused word in strategy. When everyone agrees too quickly, that's not alignment — that's avoidance. Real alignment is uncomfortable and slow. Worth knowing the difference.

A lot of strategy work ends at the slide deck. What we actually spend most of our time on: helping leaders hold their nerve when the organisation pushes back. That's where change lives or dies.

The hardest part of any transformation isn't the strategy. It's the moment a senior leader has to publicly act differently from how they've always acted. Everything else is just scaffolding.

Launching a fragrance in 2025 is a brand play, not a product play. The bottle, the name, the story — that's the product. The scent is almost secondary. Wild how far identity has outpaced utility in consumer goods.

What does a Change Maker look like? They’re not paid actors or famous faces; they're people helping to make real change happen. Today, the team from the Container Exchange (COEX) welcomed six new honorary Change Makers, from beyond the coalface of the C…lnkd.in/gZ78B34

Creativity that creates commercial outcomes.

Read: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Pandemic: How to Invent Our Way Through This. “The traits that make us humans include envisioning the future, storytelling, collaboration, and the use of tools. ” — @lisakaysolomon link.medium.com/7379uHM874

Opinion: Everything is designed. Design represents the choices we make. The team at @EarthCheck_ bring a cutting perspective to the current challenges and opportunities our world faces. Please read this report. #EarthCheck #WalkTheTalk #designthinking #circulareconomy

Reading: This is a great resource @futuryst, thank you! For anyone interested in #futures #design #designthinking #strategicforesight #storytelling #strategy #innovation #creativecapital #strategydesign #futurevisioning

Good read. An Epidemic of AI Misinformation thegradient.pub/an-epidemic-…