From practice: Sparring 🥊 Another way to help someone create their personal strategy

Following the principle of ”the wisdom is in the conversations”, I want to share with you a new approach to creating a personal strategy that’s conversational in nature.

It’s a variation from the previous approach that I shared with you:

From practice: Helping an executive create their own personal strategy

And kind of aligned with the Personal Strategy Sprint:

The Personal Strategy Sprint: a simple way of creating a personal strategy for yourself

But with an important twist: your positioning when helping someone create their personal strategy switches from coaching to sparring and challenging their strategic thinking.

Here is the visual flow of this new conversational approach:

There’s another principle embedded in this approach:

Test before you massively invest.

In practice, this approach introduces two sparring conversations in two key moments:

• After having multiple strategic options
• After translating strategy into practice with new Projects and adjustments to Day to Day

Each sparring conversation is about 3 core things:

1. Challenging assumptions

• What are the main assumptions underneath the connections between the specific areas of the Personal Strategy model?
• How much of these assumptions are supported by validated insights? How much is supported by intuition?
• Are there any blind spots?

2. Test coherence

• Are things self-consistent when you look at them from various angles?
• Are there inconsistencies that might have an impact going forward?

3. Test viability

• Will these things survive impact with reality?
• Will they be able to thrive even if the context changes?
• Will they be able to adapt to the Environment as it changes? Will the Environment adapt to them?

As I’m experimenting with Red Teaming at an organizational level, I’m finding more insights that can be put into practice at an individual level as well. As a sparring partner, you can help someone immensely in figuring out their way forward in an uncertain context.

In future articles, I’ll continue exploring the ideas shared in this article: the wisdom in conversations, challenging strategies & strategic thinking, testing before massively investing, assumptions, coherence and viability.

Meanwhile, I hope that something resonated and inspires you to create a personal strategy of your own. Here’s the visual recap of the whole sparring approach:

Enjoy navigating the uncertainty,
Bülent

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