Build strategic thinking skills
Think long-term, but move quickly
Live Virtual Workshop Series
High impact training that unleashes your team’s potential through hands-on learning applied to your work, your team and your goals. This is the ultimate learn on the go training for busy teams that want to move from overwhelm and uncertainty to solving & exploring with agility and speed.
Need to move beyond the overwhelm?
Need to move the energy from why we can’t, to how we can?
Need to stay productive through change?
And
Get.
Real.
Work.
Done.
Produce the results you know are possible!
Team Training Outcomes
Connect the dots to what matters
Focus energy on ideas & solutions
Build strategic muscle
Ask better questions
Find greater resilience
Think long-term, but move quickly
Build the thinking skills and capability you need to adapt and thrive
Practise 5 strategic thinking methods for creating and solving with an innovative and flexible mindset
5 Strategic Thinking Skills
Situate
Focus on what matters
Iterate
Experiment to learn
Calibrate
Go more when you learn more
Liberate
Explore widely,
beyond the known
Collaborate
Connect to create ideas
Virtual Workshop Series - Overview
Live, virtual team sessions
6 weekly sessions @ 2 hours each
Via Zoom and with Miro whiteboard collaboration software
The Activate team training series is focused on building skills and capability.
In these high impact sessions you’ll be doing hands-on learning and problem solving, using your team’s context – all activities will be relevant and relatable because they are dynamically applied to your team and your priorities.
Workshop Scheduling
Rolling Admission starting November 15th, 2022
Flexible session timing, custom team booking for same time each week, for 6 weeks
Learn more about the design of team workshops:
1:1 Leader Sessions
During our first session together I’ll get a chance to learn about you and your business, as well as your team’s mandate, priorities and challenges.
During the wrap-up session we’ll absorb learnings and reflections and create a clear summary of the learning and accomplishments.
(During the team launch session we’ll work collaboratively to identify the areas, issues or projects the team wants use to gain practical experience with the 5 strategic thinking skills.)
Real-time learning you can apply right away
Build decision making
muscle
Build skills & confidence in strategic thinking, and feel the power of putting things into perspective, even under pressure. Turn change into opportunity.
Step into uncertainty
with greater comfort
Learn techniques for sizing and sensemaking that enable you to see possibilities with a solution mindset, even when there isn’t clarity. Respond quickly to changing conditions and make change easier to manage.
Use the tools to
learn the craft
Actively try out and use tools and visualization techniques to speed up and improve how you work together to make decisions, share information and learn as a team.
Learn more about visualization techniques.
Maximize your team’s impact
Resolve real-world issues with your team
The team is a powerful unit of focus and action for building capability – the team has a natural line of sight to higher order business objectives and a frame for defining work and priorities.
This private team workshop series is for intact teams (a Leader and their reporting team.)
Build strategic muscle
Think long-term,
but move quickly
Meet Mary Daly
Team = Action
Why this training?
5 Powerful Tools
Power in Practice
Learn more about Mary and Activate in these 1 minute videos.
Register your team for Activate
Insights & Advice from Seasoned Pro’s
The brief video capsules below are highlights of practical examples and experience from leaders who have developed and applied strategic thinking methods within their organizations. In each of the live workshop sessions participants will learn from a wide array of leaders with diverse backgrounds and experiences who share their real-life stories in practising strategic thinking.
FAQ
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This is a private workshop series for intact teams – for a leader and their direct reports. The workshop series is hands-on learning using your team’s context - all activities are relevant and relatable because we are dynamically relating the adaptive skill to your team.
It could be a Director and their Managers, or a Manager and their reporting staff. It would be best suited for teams within organizations with over 100 people, and will be valuable in both the private and public sectors. The group size would be limited to 10 participants.
The series is open to companies from all industries.
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It’s different in a bunch of ways – both in terms of content and approach.
The idea is that the skills you build in this workshop are immediately applicable, and the learning and guideposts are relevant and relatable. What I mean by that is … we won’t look at innovation at huge organizations like Disney, Amazon or Netflix. There are so many books and courses that rely on big company examples. This course is anchored in substantive and sophisticated innovation principles, but the context is close by and relatable – it’s your work, your team and your organization You won’t feel like ‘you can’t get there from here”.
This is not a ‘watch a video’ course – it’s live training, coaching and learning. It’s not passive. You will be using and applying innovative practices and you’ll feel what it’s like to apply the strategic thinking methods in real life.
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This workshop series is a skill-building approach to thinking with an open mindset, becoming fast and flexible, adjusting as you need to, to focus on what matters.
The ‘what matters’ is a key strategic concept – making choices, at all levels of the organization, to improve the ability to achieve business goals. “Strategy” is sometimes seen as only being ‘at the top of the house’.
This course is about building strategic thinking skills – building the ability to size and make sense of things, and venture into ‘hard’ thinking where there are no clear answers and the future is uncertain.
This workshop series is not about creating THE strategy, it’s about learning 5 practical and specific strategic thinking skills that enable you to think strategically, at whatever level of the organization you are in.
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There will be 6 weekly team sessions - I will work with you to choose a consistent 2 hour window for each week.
1:1 Leadership Coaching sessions of 1 hour each will be flexibly scheduled with you to follow the team session each week.
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Yes, but only in Ottawa at the moment. This collaborative and energetic training is perfect for hybrid teams that want to make the best use of their time together back in the office.
Future offerings will include alternate formats for training offsites.
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Yes! Every organization and every team needs the ability to adjust, absorb shocks and recover quickly. The 5 Strategic Thinking Skills align directly with the Canadian Federal PS Key Leadership Competencies. Give me a call and I can share a visual map with you.
Team Session Design
Progress quickly from concept to practice
The Activate team coaching series is focused on building real skills and capability that you can apply right away.
The workshop learning experience comes from hands-on activities and dynamic problem solving, using your team’s context – all activities will be relevant and relatable because they are dynamically applied to your team and your priorities.
The design of each 2 hour team session will begin with an introduction to an Adaptive Thinking Skill, followed by a short compilation of video highlights from seasoned leaders who have used and learned from applying that skill in their respective organizations.
The session then quickly progresses to specific hands-on activities and discussions - the majority of the team time will be spent in active learning, not just listening!
Session Focus: Your Context and Your Priorities
Learning is most impactful when the content and activities are immediately relevant to the team’s real work and priorities.
In the first session, you and the team will identify the client / product / program priorities you would like to focus on. In each workshop session we will be applying each thinking skill directly to your real life challenges.
Hands-on Learning & Practice with Adaptive Thinking Skills on Your Priorities
During the launch session we will identify the areas, issues or projects that you and your team want to focus on.
Strategic Thinking Skills
Strategic Thinking as a core capability
As the pace of change accelerates, individuals and organizations need to cultivate strategic thinking as a core capability, a mindset for embracing change, seeing opportunities and ongoing reinvention. Strategic thinking skills are a meta skill set – learning how to learn, to cultivate openness to change, and resilience under pressure. These 5 strategic thinking methods are grounded in innovation principles, and enable teams to focus on what matters, to dynamically find and solve the right problem, to bring others in, and to learn by doing.
Agile in Action
I have captured the best of innovation practices into 5 “ATE’s” – Situate, Iterate, Calibrate, Liberate and Collaborate.
These 5 methods are the strategic expression of the best of lean and design thinking techniques.
They do not come with any inherent or unnecessary complexity, or ‘must do’. These strategic thinking lenses take up just enough space to learn from - they are an inspiration and a springboard for your team to apply robust innovation thinking to your team’s priorities.
SITUATE
Involves understanding, and focusing on what matters
Involves connecting the dots up to strategy; understanding how a piece fits into the bigger picture and creating the clarity required for productive action
ITERATE
Involves an experimental mindset, using questions and tests to sharpen your idea or strategy
Strategy is a fluid process of making choices, assessing, and creating greater clarity with each pass
CALIBRATE
Involves making investments that are proportionate to the level of clarity that exists; investments of time, talent and energy.
Involves placing bigger and bigger bets as you learn more
LIBERATE
Involves going beyond known possibilities, using divergent thinking approaches to explore unseen possibilities
COLLABORATE
Involves bringing new people and new ideas into the thinking process;
Involves creating productive spaces to collaborate on solving problems and generating solutions.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
Visualization
Hands-on Learning & Visualization Techniques
Sizing and sense making are at the heart of adaptive thinking. Should we go or not go? Should we go fast or go slow? Does this thing matter?
Every workshop session will have adaptive thinking woven in - you will not only learn about the technique, you will embody innovation and adaptive thinking by trying out a range of visualizing and sizing techniques with each activity.
LEGEND
