Who belongs in the strategy process: sponsor, coordination, and co-creation

Who is the sponsor of the strategy process?

Usually the management or the board. The sponsor wants the process, provides budget and time, and protects it as soon as day-to-day business pushes back. This is not a ceremonial role. It's needed precisely when someone wants to postpone the workshop.

People often ask about a team approach, and strategy work is team work. For this role, though, that only goes so far: a group can carry a process, but when there's conflict, one person has to decide.

A sponsor who only shows up for the kickoff isn't a sponsor. The organization notices within two weeks, and from that point on everyone involved knows exactly how much priority the initiative has.

Who runs the process day to day?

In many companies, coordination and steering sit with a full-time strategist or with the executive assistant to management. Mid-sized companies often have neither, and then the role gets improvised.

It doesn't have to be the most experienced people. Younger talent works too, as long as they're well connected and respected in the company. What the role really needs is access: the ability to lock in meetings, demand input, and follow up on commitments.

Timing and duration matter more than the person. Fill the role early and keep it in place beyond strategy development if you can. The most common break in strategy processes happens exactly where development ends: whoever ran the workshop is back to being a division head the next day, and nobody feels responsible for execution.

Who should take part in shaping it?

Co-creation means active participation by people outside the inner leadership circle. Above all, it means involving the people who will later execute the strategy early on.

Experience shows that senior executives don't like being second-guessed and, especially when it comes to setting direction, don't want a participatory process. Yet that's exactly where the value lies: participants bring practical knowledge and different perspectives that let you stress-test your own thinking. And when you let others take part, you make them co-owners of the strategy that emerges.

There's a price attached. Participation raises expectations, participants pursue their own agendas, and dynamics emerge that nobody planned for. That's why any decision in favor of co-creation has to come with a clear statement of where its limits are.

In practice, co-creation works best in clearly defined formats. One session with twelve people from different areas, two hours, a single question, a documented result. That's manageable, it produces material, and it doesn't create any expectation of a vote on the decision.

A vote is not a strategy decision. Just because everyone contributed doesn't mean everyone will like the result, and it doesn't make the result better either. In the end, the decision belongs to the people who answer for the consequences.

How big should the group be?

The first workshop is not the place for breadth. The impact of these sessions drops noticeably beyond roughly eight to ten participants, no matter how good the facilitation is. First, top management has to reach shared insights.

The extended leadership circle can join the second workshop: division heads, and depending on company size, department or team leads as well. That's where the target picture gets tested for robustness, and for that you need the people who will later have to hold it up against reality.

Separately, there are ways throughout the process to involve more people without enlarging the decision-making circle. The qualitative interviews in the analysis phase are the most obvious one: that's where you gather the views and expectations of internal and external stakeholders.

Do you need outside support?

That single question actually contains three, and they get mixed up all the time.

• Capacity. On top of day-to-day business, do you have the hours for data gathering, interviews, analysis, and follow-up? That's a math question, not a pride question.
• Experience. Have you ever run a process like this before? Anyone doing it for the first time pays tuition in places that can be named in advance.
• Neutrality. Is there someone in-house who can facilitate without depending on management? In owner-led companies, this is the hardest of the three questions and the most legitimate reason to bring in outside support.

When you talk to someone, a simple test helps: ask them to describe what stays in your company at the end. Anyone who describes a final document is selling a project. Anyone who describes who on your side fills which role afterward has understood what this is about.

The standard objection is that consulting is expensive and a mid-sized company doesn't need it. That objection targets a picture of consulting that barely exists anymore: armies of junior consultants working out a strategy that then gets presented. For mid-sized companies, the more useful form is a sparring partner who structures the process and lets the leadership team develop the content.

How do you communicate during the process?

The era of secret projects is over. Top management hatching a strategy behind closed doors and then presenting it to the organization works worse today than it used to, because the people who are supposed to execute it are no longer satisfied with simply being told the outcome.

So bring your people along early, even if the first message is only that you've started in a small group. After that comes the detail work: define channels, make the steps transparent, explain the expected time and resource commitment, show the roadmap. And name people outside the leadership team who can act as multipliers.

Language includes the name. In everyday corporate life, strategies are called "Strategy 2030" or simply "our strategy." There's nothing wrong with being matter-of-fact, as long as it isn't a cover for a lack of imagination. A strategy that's meant to take hold in an organization can handle a headline that says what's at stake. Bertelsmann called theirs "Tomorrow Is Already Today," and everyone in the company immediately knew what it was about.

Communication also raises a question that's rarely asked in mid-sized companies and routinely underestimated in international ones: what language does the process run in? Where English is the agreed language and fluency in the room varies widely, it distorts the substantive discussion. Native speakers get to define the terms, and with that more weight than the substance warrants.