Strategic Thinking: Plan, Decide and Execute Strategy [EN]

What you'll learn

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• Run a two-day strategy session from preparation to output: participants, facilitator, handouts, both days

• Determine where the company actually stands using stakeholder analysis, an external scan and gap analysis

• Turn a strategy document into an implementation plan with owners, resources and milestones

• Design KPIs that survive contact with reality, using critical success factors and impact mapping

• Set OKRs in the "from X to Y by Z" format and run the full quarterly cycle including scoring

• Frame any business problem as Problem, Goal, Constraint, Metric before proposing anything

• Apply Kotter's eight steps and the rider-elephant-path model when the strategy meets resistance

• Recognise confirmation bias and anchoring in your own strategic reasoning, not just in other people's

• Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries

• Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Who this course is for:

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• Managers whose annual plan turns out to be a list of activities rather than a strategy
• Team and department leads asked to contribute to a strategy session without ever having run one
• Founders and functional heads who set goals every January and review them in December
• Business analysts and consultants who need the layer above requirements
• HR and operations leaders responsible for making a strategy actually happen
• Anyone who has watched a good strategy die at the point of execution
• Managers preparing for a role where planning becomes the main part of the job

Description

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This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most documents called a strategy are a list of things the company intends to do. A strategy is a set of choices about what it will not do, and those are much harder to write down.

Where strategy work goes wrong

The session happens, everyone leaves energised, and the deck is opened twice more that year. Or the plan is genuinely good and dies in execution because nobody was named as the owner of anything in it. Or the indicators get attached at the end, chosen because they were easy to pull from the existing system, and now the company is optimising for whatever was measurable in March.

There is also the version where the strategy survives, the people resist, and the resistance gets treated as a communication problem when it is a self-interest problem.

The five things this course gives you

Clear thinking first, because a strategy is a chain of inferences and one weak link takes the rest down. Six lessons on argument, cognitive bias, sources, and decision models for genuine uncertainty.

Then the planning itself: the five-step model, preparing the session, establishing where the company actually stands through stakeholder analysis and gap analysis, and running the two-day offsite properly, day one on the starting point and day two on the target.

Then translating strategy into something executable, which is the business analysis layer most managers never learn. Problem, Goal, Constraint, Metric. Requirements, AS-IS and TO-BE processes, and how to defend a requirement when both the business and the technical side want it changed.

Measurement and making it stick

Eight lessons on KPIs, and the honest version: critical success factors before indicators, impact mapping, the measurement traps, the reporting hierarchy, and the six myths that wreck most measurement systems including the one about tying indicators to pay. Then OKR — four lessons on setting objectives as "from X to Y by Z", running the quarterly cycle and scoring it at the end.

And finally change management, because everything above is worthless if the organisation declines to move. Kotter's eight steps, the rider and elephant model for the emotional half, quick wins, and how to finish a change rather than let it dissolve.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have facilitated strategy sessions that produced real decisions and strategy sessions that produced a nicely formatted document, and the difference was almost always in the preparation rather than the room.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

How to get the most out of it

Take one goal your team is carrying this year and rebuild it through the course: the reasoning, the plan, the indicator, the quarterly objective, the rollout. One goal done properly teaches more than six done in theory. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.