Ken Whitton – Strategy Coach
  • Are you looking to enhance the leadership of your organisation by improving your senior managers’ capability in strategic thinking?
  • Do you wish your managers were more attuned to the longer-term opportunities and threats facing the business, not just consumed with today’s detail?
  • Do you wish your managers were better at developing well-thought-through strategies, not just short-term action plans?
  • Do you want your managers to work better cross-functionally, not just stay narrowly focused on their own “silos”?
All of the above?

Before you send them all off on some expensive Business School course on strategy, save yourself a lot of time and money and give me a call. As a strategy coach, I work with managers on how to think and act strategically and how to approach and resolve strategic issues.

I have worked for 25 years with individuals and organisations on strategy: as external strategy consultant, as internal Strategy Director, as a trainer on Leadership Development programmes and as an executive coach to CEOs and other senior directors of major companies. I can also claim to have a good grasp of the theory – I came top of my MBA class at INSEAD, Europe’s leading business school.

So I have substantial experience in helping line managers deal with strategic issues. This has given me an excellent feel for what managers find particularly difficult when faced with strategic situations – and a wealth of practical experience in how to help them through these difficulties.

As a complement to my strategy expertise, I have 20 years training and experience in personal development, notably through my connection with the Praxis Centre at Cranfield School of Management, which specialises in the application of psychological insights to management.

The relevance of this side of my experience to the work of a strategy coach? The fact is, the reason why most managers struggle with strategy is only partly a matter of analytical skills and tools. To apply the tools requires a more general ability in strategic thinking – and that is as much a test of an individual’s personality and attitude as of their sheer brainpower.

Bringing Strategy Alive

Strategic thinking is a creative process. It requires as much intuition and judgement as it does logic and analysis. It is about synthesis, not just analysis.

Amongst the components of strategic thinking are:
  • a capacity to see problems as a whole, to step back from the detail to see the “big picture” and think about issues in a “joined-up” way;
  • the ability to size up a situation and spot the meaningful patterns in a mass of complex data, separating the significant from the trivial;
  • appreciating how to work in complex systems, where small changes can have large effects, and even the most careful plans can have unintended consequences
  • a constructive approach to ambiguity – as F. Scott Fitzgerald phrased it, “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”;
  • understanding how to operate under risk and uncertainty, developing options and contingencies where a single "right answer” is impossible to gauge.
There are certainly models and frameworks which can help managers improve on these dimensions. But in my experience, the true test of a manager's aptitude for strategic thinking, and hence their likely ability to succeed at Board level, is found in questions such as:
  • Can they stand back and reflect, view a situation from multiple perspectives and carefully consider alternative options – or are they happier diving straight in to action?
  • Do they lift their heads above the parapet and look for learnings from departments, companies, industries different from their own; and are they interested in new developments and future possibilities – or do they insist on a tight focus on the here and now?
  • Do they relish uncertainty and change as potential sources of opportunity and advantage - or are they more comfortable driving efficiency improvements in stable environments?
  • Do they understand where their business unit interacts with others and appreciate what it takes for the whole organisation to work together – or do they focus single-mindedly on their own patch?
  • Do they have the courage and conviction to make big decisions with confidence, even when hard data is lacking and no standard rules of operation apply – or must they have all the facts nailed down?
Clearly, these questions raise issues of temperament, not just cognitive skill, and this is the real challenge to many would-be Leaders. As Warren Bennis, a great American writer on Leadership, observes:

“I have never seen anyone derailed from top leadership because of a lack of business literacy or conceptual skills. It is always because of lapses of judgment or questions of character. Always.”

That is why my approach to helping managers improve their strategic thinking emphasises strategy coaching. “Classroom" training can be useful to cover the core concepts of strategy (and I run a number of such modules, covering all the main dimensions of strategy – development, implementation, communication etc) but it is invariably the coaching sessions that allow the concepts to come alive.

Strategy coaching sessions let me show managers how to integrate and assimilate the key strategy concepts and how to use them in the particular context they find themselves in – their political situation, the personalities of the people they lead, the culture of the organisation, and perhaps above all, their own personal style and aspirations.

I believe in taking a holistic view of a person, understanding their values and dreams as well as their technical skills and performance targets. My rather unique combination of skills gives me the ability to work with managers on both the 'hard' and 'soft' sides of business, understanding their commercial goals and strategies - but also, the personal emotions and stresses that are invariably strirred by today's organisational life.

I've picked out a few typical examples of where and how strategy coaching can be particularly useful in the section of this website titled "You need a Strategy Coach when...". I say more about coaching, and the coaching process, in "How Coaching Works". And you can read about my approach to strategy in "The Meaning of Strategy".  There's a one-page summary of my qualifications and experience in the "About Me" page.

In sum, I believe that strategic thinking is a transferable skill, from a knowledgeable and experienced coach to a committed manager and/or management team, over time, working on real business issues.

If you’d like to discuss further, please ring me on ++44-1494-757272 or email me using the form on the Contact page.