Leadership teams spend hours debating strategic priorities, but often struggle to align on what truly matters most. I recently facilitated a simple strategic exercise with a client's leadership team that cut through the noise and revealed both surprising alignment and strategic blind spots in under three hours.
The premise: Give your leadership team a hypothetical budget—typically 3-5% of annual revenue—and ask them how they'd invest it in the business. Then dig deeper to understand why those investments matter.
What emerged wasn't just a list of spending priorities. It was a clear roadmap of the fundamental business drivers holding back their growth.
Why Traditional Planning Can Miss the Mark
Most strategic planning starts with high-level vision statements and works down to tactics. But this approach often misses the real constraints and opportunities hiding in plain sight. Your leadership team knows where the business struggles, they live with these challenges daily. The problem is, we rarely create space to systematically capture and prioritize these insights.
This exercise flips the traditional approach. Instead of starting with vision and working down, we start with resource allocation decisions and work up to root causes. The combination reveals strategic priorities that are both grounded in operational reality and aligned with business impact.
How the Exercise Uncovers Strategic Insights
Phase 1: Individual Investment Allocation
Each leader privately determines their top 5-7 investment priorities, from technology and talent to processes and capabilities. This individual phase prevents groupthink and ensures authentic perspectives.
Phase 2: Pattern Recognition
When teams share their priorities, clear themes emerge. Technology needs cluster together. Talent gaps become obvious. Process improvements align across departments. These patterns reveal where the organization feels the most pressure.
Phase 3: Root Cause Analysis
Here's where the magic happens. For each investment priority, we dig deeper using the “5 Whys” technique. That expensive CRM system request? It's actually about sales team efficiency. The warehouse automation proposal? It's really about scalability constraints. The additional headcount? It's addressing workload balance issues that affect customer service.
Phase 4: Solution Expansion
Once you understand the root causes, you can brainstorm multiple ways to address each need. That expensive CRM might have lower-cost alternatives. The warehouse automation might be solved through process changes before technology investment.
Moving from Insight to Action
The exercise produces three critical outputs: aligned understanding of root business constraints, multiple solution pathways for each constraint, and clear prioritization based on impact and feasibility.
But the real value comes in the weeks following the session. Teams report making decisions faster because they have shared clarity on what matters most. Resource allocation discussions become more strategic because everyone understands the underlying business drivers.
Most importantly, the exercise creates a framework for ongoing strategic thinking. Once teams experience the power of digging into root causes, they naturally apply this thinking to future challenges and opportunities.
When to Use This Exercise
This approach works particularly well for:
- Leadership teams feeling pulled in too many directions
- Organizations with competing priority discussions
- Teams preparing for annual planning cycles
- Companies sensing they're missing strategic opportunities
- Leadership groups that need better alignment before major decisions
The exercise is especially powerful during times of growth or transition, when the organization's needs are evolving faster than formal planning processes can capture.
Making Strategy Practical
Strategy shouldn't be an abstract exercise disconnected from operational reality. The best strategic insights often come from the people closest to daily business challenges. This exercise creates a systematic way to capture those insights and translate them into strategic direction.
Your leadership team already knows what's holding back your business. They just need the right framework to surface those insights and transform them into aligned action.