Thought Of The Week

“You will deliver your ‘Strategy 2030’ through the daily Decisions and Actions of people who hold your strategy in their hearts, not in their title.

That makes your 2026 kick-off the strategic moment of your decade. 

Last week I sat with an American CEO overlooking a satisfyingly damp, foggy early-morning London skyline. He was loving the British ‘authenticity’ of the scene.

We were discussing how to accelerate the extremely ambitious, ‘Strategy 2030’.

I asked him a familiar question:

“Who, precisely, must take the first brave Decisions and Actions to start making Results change?”

“Honestly? mostly people I’ve never met.”

“OK, and what ways do you have to give those people:

· The emotions, energy and purpose to be brave and do new things,

· 100% clarity on WHAT they need to do differenty, and

· Permission to start doing it - without waiting for instructions

That moment captures the central challenge of ‘Strategy 2030’. We don’t win through cascading the strategy deck.

We win through the everyday decisions of people who hold the strategy in their hearts, not in their title, and will fight to deliver it. There are a variety of tools my client and I have agreed to use, and the 2026 kick-off is a vital part of our mix.

So as more and more ‘Strategy 2030’ decks come my way, I want to explain how to ensure your 2026 kick-off accelerates your 2030 success.
 

Never Underestimate The Power of Your Kick-off.

Live theatre and shared experiences build emotion and change lives across the world every day. But in my experience (Yes folks, around 60 kick-offs a year for 20+ years = over 1000 kick-off events globally), most CXO’s use their KO budget to:

1. Amuse – I leave happy, but nothing changes commercially.

2. Overwhelm – I see lots of your slides but my new Actions are unclear.

3. Command (The CXO broadcast) – I leave to await my specific commands and to serve the commander, not to serve the strategy.

The answer to generating live theatre and shared experiences is generally not to try and make a corporate event more “rock n roll”.

People take their work extremely seriously. They want purpose. They want to know how they can deliver the strategy that makes us win. We can make that a shared experience. 

Here are four ways to ensure KO 2026 accelerates your 2030 Strategy:

1. Design For Decisions (Emotional), Not Just Comprehension (Intellectual)

A kick-off is theatre. Theatre has emotion and energy. And your strategy needs emotion and energy just as much as it needs intellectual comprehension. Emotions and energy can generate moments of mass decision-making and commitment.

If you don’t engineer a space where people can Decide to take new Actions with clarity and commitment, the strategy remains a beautifully worded document. Your job is to architect the moment where people quietly decide to change their behaviour on Monday morning.

2. Make Strategy Personal — Every Single Person Must See Themselves Inside It

People will fight for what they feel personally responsible for. They won’t fight for a paragraph in a strategy document. A Strategy 2030 kick-off must create absolute clarity: what my role requires, what new Decisions and Actions I must take, and what ‘good’ looks like in real life.

This is NOT the classic 12 people round a flip chart thing. It is 1-1 coaching (to each other), it is quiet reflection in the grounds, it is 500 people putting their newly minted 2030 strategy goals – to deliver in Q1 2026 – up on the screen through an event app and committing to delivering them.

We had one event where the CEO missed dinner because he offered to hold 1-1 discussions to talk over new Actions to deliver the strategy immediately after his closing presentation. The queue to sign off strategic actions 1-1 with a man they rarely saw was huge and I had never seen him so elated.

Those inspired ‘post-theatre’ discussions reverberated around the globe through the coming year.

3. Give Explicit Permission To Act At Speed (Even When Uncertain)

If people leave feeling they must wait for alignment or approval, we’ve just slowed Strategy 2030. The kick-off must remove psychological and hierarchical brakes. Clarify boundaries, what people are empowered to decide, and where speed matters more than certainty.

Remember, NOBODY FEARS FAILURE! They fear the consequence of failure. You can make that consequence acceptable (to serious people with children to feed) from the stage.

4. Install A Shared Operating System

A moonshot strategy collapses without shared language and habits. The kick-off must install the operating system the organisation will use all year.

Know how to tell stories. Know how to install vocabulary. Don’t delegate this to ‘the people team’ if you are leading the strategy. Not everybody who knows how to make payroll, recruitment and redundancy happen seamlessly is also best qualified to coach the CXO on inspirational leadership.

I happen to be biased, but the high accountability/challenge, and practical moonshot architecture of Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate works. It also makes fertile ground for people to decide upon their bold new Actions in a workshop before they leave.

We’ve done that with 3000 people in one room – the entire audience watched in unified awed silence as the bold, strategic commitments scrolled on the screen.

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My Week

My boardroom advisory work is very close to my heart. So are the people being abused in Ukraine this week through attacks on their sons, daughters, homes and energy infrastructure. We have also seen incursions into Estonia, Poland and Belgium recently.

A new instruction to work on accelerating change and excellence in a company that is central to defending our, and Europe’s, borders was therefore very welcome. It has been deeply occupying my mind and I am very honoured to be involved.

It was an enormous pleasure to deliver a closing Keynote on Moonshot Architecture for UBS in Switzerland on Monday and to deliver keynotes for UK clients at Heathrow near London and at the fabulous Telford International Center in the English midlands.

Book Of The Week

IMPACT by my friend Dominic Colenso is a superb, practical manual if you want to generate emotion and energy around your 2030 plan in addition to intellectual understanding.

Dom is a RADA rooted theatre and TV actor (and former Thunderbird on the big screen) who works extensively with business leaders and also speaks regularly at events. He understands the theory and application, and communicates both in a way you can immediately apply (just add your courage and drive).

The book will shift your approach to presenting and teach you how to clarify your intention, simplify your message, and use presence, voice and energy to generate emotion and influence strategic action.

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim