A Course to Remember

The first edition of this live, practice-focused course about Strategy, on Jan-Feb this year, was an extraordinary experience. First and foremost because of the 50+ high-quality people who attended it. It was an excellent opportunity to learn, allowing me to aim for an even better edition in the May-June timeframe.

The feedback received from course's first edition participants:

You might be familiar with some of my work: the Strategy Clockwork, the Penta Model, the Adaptive Strategy, the Strategy Dialogue, the Strategic Horizons ... a lot of "connecting the dots" that I had to do over the past 15 years, and a lot of filtering of the signal from the noise.

So, why an online course about Strategy? First of all, to help the people who need this get rid of the chatter and clarify how Strategy should work, with a focus on the practice of building and implementing it.

I have one ambition: to be a state-of-the-art Strategy course about (a) connecting the dots of the valid concepts, theories, and methodologies about Strategy's core processes, and about (b) practicing all that!

Yes, that kind of Strategy course is what I aim to do. A course to remember!

A Framework for a Course

I believe that any course without a clear framework is a waste of time. It should be a framework with a very well organized series of consecutive stages to be mapped against the course modules. In our case which could be the framework around which we could mold our Strategy course? You've guessed it, the Strategy Clockwork! The integrative framework that attempts to connect the dots of all Strategy's processes, covering the entire Strategy cycle, from Experimentation, to Formulation, to Execution! And back.

If you want to know more about the Strategy Clockwork, the quickest resource available is the Modeling Strategy article, published one month ago. And if you want to know even more than that ... well, that would be the Explaining Strategy course that I'm talking about here. With such a framework, I'd say that there are a couple of chances for this course to be A Course to Remember. And to get aglimpse of the technicality of this courses practice part, this is the chain of the 15 matrices employed during the Practice Sessions for getting our hands on how to effectively work with this framework:

If you want to know more about the course, take a look at the recorded Preview event recording (36'):

You can also take a look at the slide deck use in the Preview event and at the associated presentation text related to the slides.

The Modules

How would we breakdown framework's stages on the course modules? Would we have 12 course modules for Strategy Clockwork's 10 + 2 stages? No, that's too many. What about grouping them in four modules, like this:

What do you think? Would this work? I hope so! :-)

Comfortable Level of Interactivity

Did you like the Strategy courses on Udemy, Coursera, or on LinkedIn? Well, I didn't. Content aside, I couldn't ask those instructors anything, including to give me an example, or to zoom-in on a certain topic. Zero interactivity! Courses, even if delivered online, shouldn't be that way. They should be highly interactive, they should be LIVE, with the instructor and the students talking to each other, seeing each other, being able to interrupt and ask a question. Because that's the closest thing to a real classroom.

Ok, so If I would do this online Strategy course, it should be a LIVE course, like a video-conference and give students a chance to 'raise hands', to ask questions, or even to talk to each other.

And one more thing: It wouldn't work with 100 people in the virtual room. Not even with 50. I guess that we would need a maximum of 20-25 people enrolled in each class/cohort, to secure the reasonably-comfortable level of interactivity.

But the Earth is Round ...

Yeah, that's a problem for an online course. When Australians wake up, Europeans prepare to go to bed. So, what kind of course sessions times could we have, in order to be comfortable for everybody? Tough problem, with only one viable answer: Time-zones Cohorts. What does this mean? That we would have the same session delivered three times a day: one session in the UTC morning, for the Asia-Pacific region (APAC), one in the afternoon, for Europe, Middle East, and Africa region (EMEA), and one in the UTC evening, for North America and Latin America region (AMERICAS). That's how this would look like:

These are the times for two-hour sessions, possibly extended to three hours, depending on the number of questions & answers. But given the intensity and technicality of the course, I guess that longer sessions would be difficult to digest, don't you think so?

The Mandatory Practice Sessions

I think that it doesn't matter how interesting would the concepts presented be, and how nice the slides displayed, no online course would be complete without having each Course Session complemented by a Practice Session. That allows the students to grasp those concepts by developing their hands-on practical applications. Yes, that would require a certain supporting technical environment. No problem.

Theory without Practice doesn't fare very well.

So, in the case of our Strategy course, how would we do that. I guess that through a web-based application that would include data-entry and teamwork voted decisions for each stage of the framework. With output from one stage used as input for other(s), downstream.

Hard to do? Not at all, if you are a 15+ software engineer with development experience in web-based applications. The only problem was the number of toolkits that are required to implement the full Strategy cycle. More precisely, 25 of them. This is what resulted from taking this challenge, enabling the pairing four Practice Sessions of the course:

I would say that this is a unique opportunity to test the concepts and methods presented in the course, by using the StrategyGlue web-based platform that is made available as a team exercise environment for building the Strategy model and the Strategic Plan model, for cases selected from several templates available or proposed by course participants.

StrategyGlue? Yes, why not, as we technically-enable an integrative framework?

The Necessary Teamwork

The practice work is done by the team members in the same cohort. Which turns this course into a true teamwork exercise. This is what we do:

• The course is organized on three cohorts of maximum 25 people, which form a team working on the same Case Study.
• Each team works during the coach-lead practice sessions on creating a Strategy model and a Strategic Plan model for the Case that they selected from a set of cases available or proposed by a team member.
• At each stage of the Strategy Clockwork methodology, the team members suggest model components that must be decided upon for that stage, then the alternatives proposed are voted, and a final team decision is made.
• The StrategyGlue web-based platform is providing a separate team environment to each of the three cohort teams.
• The platform facilitates the communication between team members during the practice sessions, as well as outside of the session times, 24/7 every day, for the whole duration of the course.
• A separate video-conferencing platform is made available 24/7 to each team for instant team meetings related to their Case Study practice exercise, complemented by a discussions board for off-line team conversations.

Will it work? For the two dozen in-class courses I have delivered, it worked very well. Will it work online, as well? We will see. By the way, we are not using Zoom. Our video-conferencing platform of choices is Whereby.com, a Norwegian company with powerful Telecom parents. And the learning platform is Disco.co.

Ok, so everything seems to be setup, should we do this LIVE, online Strategy course, or not? I say, let's do it. When?

What about giving 2024 a good start with a smart investment into cleaning-up and styling-up your Strategy, if you are a practitioner, or the Strategy of one of your customers, if you are consultant, tying up any loose ends and putting a little bit more logic and methodology through it? This is the calendar:

So what do you say, should we make together this Strategy course, one to remember? The course website has some more information. An interesting part is the Fair Pricing Policy that we have adopted from this May-June edition onwards.

By the way, here is the PDF Course Prospectus. One step at a time: Let's first meet in the Explaining Strategy Community. Registration is free.

I hope that this Strategy course will help someone. What do you think?

As always, your feedback is more than welcomed.