After over 10 years of facilitating over 50 organizations in strategy development and strategic planning, it appears to me that the most strategic things for an organization are often not complex. This is the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) contexts that many organizations operate in, notwithstanding. The converse is actually true: the most strategic issues are often so simple that many leaders would be inclined to ignore them. The tendency is to get lost in high-sounding and complex details, frameworks and analysis that could easily lead to paralysis or apathy. In fact, in my observation, the simpler the strategy, the easier it is to communicate and execute it, and the more agile it is likely to be.

How about addressing the straightforward, often-repeated and well-known and least attended feedback and suggestions? Another temptation is to assume that the strategic has to be always generated by those who hold the top echelons of the organization. While strategic leadership entails strategic thinking, acting and influencing, the genesis of the thoughts is an idea here and another one there that may have emanated from conversations with the invisible, unheard and in unfortunate organizational contexts, unappreciated employees and stakeholders. The output is often decks and big documents that contain high-sounding, complex, and utopian ideas while the sessions from which these ideas were birthed make for talk-shows at best because in the end nothing ever gets done!

So, here are some five C-sense (C is for common) questions and potentially, strategic starting points, that you might want to consider in your next strategy sessions:

• What in the world are you trying to achieve? In other words, as an organization, what is your goal or mission? Do not confuse this for activities or means. This should be about the greater purpose and goal. Unless and until you are able to articulate this in a way so simple that the junior-most staff is able to understand, you will most likely be muddling through.
• What has changed in your operating context? Without a simple answer to this, neatly completed SWOT and PESTLE frameworks will only accelerate you to oblivion because you are likely stuck with the status quo.
• Are the leaders in the room willing to honestly and proactively change or adapt? Complete honesty will be required here otherwise, it is not worth your time trying to even imagine a strategy.
• Are the leaders willing to think and actually encourage thinking amongst the rest of the team members? It is amazing how little thinking is done by many people and organizations. It would appear that in many organizations, it is actually frowned upon. Try to think (yes think) about the last time when someone suggested something that sounded different in a meeting because they clearly had taken time to think it through: how far did the suggestion go? If it mostly received lip service but died on arrival it may be the case that the leaders frown upon thinking : comfort is prioritized over thinking.
• Finally, and back to the C-sense: what are those common issues that almost everybody knows they work or do not, they need to stop or start, have been over-suggested but never-attempted? The common customer feedback issues? The common employee satisfaction highlights? the contextual changes everyone is talking about? known opportunities that never get exploited, corporate performance red flags no one wants to deal with? known threats which no one is willing to mitigate? Your strategic thrusts cannot be too far from these if the thinking begins from here, and so might be the fast lane to self-destruction if complexity is glorified for complexity’s sake.