Insigniam consultants don't tell the client what the strategy should be; rather, we provide a reliable process and proven methodology to stimulate the best thinking that the people of the business have to offer, plus the coaching and the consulting to bring the breakthrough strategy to fruition.

Achieving and sustaining competitive advantage requires more than incremental adjustments to your existing ways of doing business. Extraordinary performance requires an ability to conceive and execute the kind of strategies that re-think conventions and familiar pathways: strategies that set a new course for an enterprise, and oftentimes, change the rules of the enterprise and the marketplace.

"Business-as-usual" results (stable or incremental increases in current performance) are achieved on a foundation of realistic or predictable planning, strong and consistent follow-through, and developing an organization of people with the appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, ability, and experience. Yet, even flawless execution of an incremental strategy will produce little gain over the competition in the long run.

In today's highly competitive and challenging business environment, only breakthrough results can generate sustainable competitive advantage. Breakthrough results are produced by standing on a platform that includes the basics of predictable planning and organization development, and then doing the type of strategic thinking that transcends current beliefs, assumptions, practices, and realities. Breakthrough strategic thinking generates newly invented models for envisioning facing and going to the market, and acting.

Insigniam's process for Making Strategy Actionable* is not an exercise in wishful thinking or a whimsical approach to future planning-not quick solutions or simple answers. It is based in a simple principle: in order to conceive of what was previously considered to be unthinkable, leaders must first be sufficiently unhooked from the dominating influence of the past on their perspective of the internal and external world of their enterprise. Whether recognized or not, the past limits what is possible. It filters the opportunities we can discern: it determines the actions that we take: that is the nature of human beings.

To see the widest horizon of possibilities and opportunities for the future, it is necessary for the executive group to unravel itself from the continuum of the company's past. The primary element of this phase is a series of structured conversations in work sessions that reveal and unhook the beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions that are dominating the shape of the enterprise's future for this group of key leaders.

This gives the "blank sheet of paper" that is so critical for any creative effort. The executive group then works from the marketplace of the future to design a business that is able to dominate its competition and to win the hearts and minds of its customers. Using Insigniam's Merlin Principle*, the leaders then work backwards to first lay out pathways to the future and then develop robust strategic action plans to fulfill on the opportunities and to resolve any barriers to success.

This process brings the knowledge and experience of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in your enterprise to thinking about the market and the enterprise from a new perspective that is not limited by that knowledge and experience.

The output is a strategic plan with the correlated and necessary conversations to have a roadmap to the future that is fully actionable and can be implemented , as well as the structure to assure that the required actions are taken on time.

This initiative can also include coaching the organization's leaders to create a robust plan to implement the new strategy. The executive group establishes an environment in the organization in which individuals and groups are inspired by the intended future and are mobilized to invent actions and projects that are appropriate to building a bridge between the intended future and the present.

One side benefit of Insigniam's Making Strategy Actionable solution is that it eliminates the need for gaining additional buy-in. The executives are committed to that which they have authored and the next several levels of management have participated and contributed-thus adding great velocity to the time it takes from conceiving a strategy to reaping a new order of business results.