Big Number: Courage in Strategy Workshops

Observations from a strategy workshop.

The Scene

Two young entrepreneurs have formed a new corporate group through two acquisitions. Two grown organisations, two cultures, two workforces that until recently existed independently. And in the middle two owners who must not only operationally bring together what is already legally connected, but also set a common direction.

Before the workshop I was asked to facilitate, the two had a concern. They had formulated ambitious goals for the group, truly ambitious goals. And they hesitated to share them in full clarity with the group. Too big, too much, too early? The question in the room was a classic leadership question: how much truth can an organisation that is just finding itself bear?

The Surprising Insight

They shared the goals. In full. And the opposite happened of what they had feared. The participants did not react with shock, not with defense, not with quiet head-shaking. They reacted with seriousness, with energy, with the feeling: we are being taken seriously. The ambitious number was not an imposition, it was an act of trust. Anyone who shares their biggest goals makes themselves vulnerable. And precisely this vulnerability was not exploited but reciprocated.

For the two owners, this was the actual surprise of the day. Not the strategy worked out later, not the derived measures, not even the new shape of purpose, mission, and vision. But the experience: transparency about one's own ambitions is not the risk it is often perceived to be. It is the lever.

The Thesis

Many leaders, particularly younger ones, who must still legitimise themselves in acquired organisations, tend to communicate ambitious goals only when they consider them "secured". First deliver, then talk. The concern behind it is usually doubly wrapped: as consideration for employees ("we don't want to overwhelm them") and as entrepreneurial caution ("we don't want to seem unrealistic").

My observation: what appears as protection of employees is often protection of one's own flank. Because anyone who does not voice his ambitious goals does not have to be measured against them. Holding back big numbers is not only care, it is also the leadership's self-protection from its own commitment.

Transparency about ambitious goals is not a risk for the organisation. It is a risk for the leadership, and precisely for that reason so effective.

Employees sense very precisely whether they are trusted with the whole truth. If they are fed careful half-sentences, mistrust arises. They could handle the numbers; what hurts is the feeling of not being taken seriously. The ambitious number, openly stated, reverses this dynamic.

What It Takes for Transparency to Work

Transparency does not arise from appeals. It arises from frame. Three things were decisive in this workshop:

First: preparation of the leadership. In the preparatory talks it was not about scaling down the goals, but about strengthening the two owners in their ambition. They were not to push through the big numbers against their own reluctance, but to be able to carry them, inwardly clarified, not just rhetorically rehearsed.

Second: psychological safety in the room. Before strategic content is discussed, the group must experience itself as a group. I opened the workshop with a simple exercise: each person told three things about themselves the others did not know, two true, one made up. The others had to guess. This exercise works on several levels. It creates closeness without pathos. It practices vulnerability in small dose. And it changes the room: anyone who has just shared something personal also hears strategic content differently.

Third: the reverse order. Many strategy workshops begin with purpose, mission, and vision, and derive goals from there. We took the opposite path. After the opening, the owners first shared their ambitious goals. Only then did the group, based on what they had heard, jointly develop purpose, mission, and vision. This is methodically uncomfortable, but honest: the goals were not hidden behind a preceding meaning narrative, but placed nakedly in the room. The group could afterwards not only agree or reject, but co-shape the meaning frame in which these goals were to fit. That turns employees into co-owners of the narrative.

What Remains

At the end of the day there was not only a sharpened strategy on the flipchart. There was also an experience in the room that weighs more than any package of measures: that this group, just formed from two firms, can carry a common ambitious horizon. And that this horizon does not become weaker when shared, but stronger.

For the two owners this was confirmation of their path. For me as facilitator it was a reminder that the most important work in such processes happens before the workshop, in the quiet strengthening of those who need the courage to put their whole truth in the room.

True transformation does not begin where leadership gives the right answers. It begins where leadership asks the honest questions, and shares the honest numbers.

Further reading

• Buffer: Transparent salaries in practice – One of the best-known real-world examples of open pay structures.