STRATEGY BOOST™ | STRATEGY WORKSHOP FOR TEAM ALIGNMENT
Align Your Team with a Strategy Boost™ Workshop
Not every planning need calls for a full strategic plan.
Sometimes a team, department, or smaller organization is stuck, pulling in different directions, or coming out of an annual retreat without decisions, and it needs to agree on what matters most over the next year or so. That's harder than it sounds when every leader arrives with different priorities, and the day-to-day work keeps pulling at everyone's attention.
What Is a Strategy Boost™?
A Strategy Boost™ is Focused Momentum's strategy workshop for team alignment. Built around a custom-designed, in-person 1–2 day workshop, it aligns a leadership team, department or division, board, or smaller organization on its priorities for the next 12–18 months, without changing the organization's strategic direction.
Every Strategy Boost™ drives strategic agreements and produces a Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™: what to do in the next 30–90 days, the next six months, and the next 12–18 months. It is typically completed within 45 days and is led by Focused Momentum Founder and Chief Strategist Cecilia Lynch.
Is a Strategy Boost™ Right for Your Team?
A Strategy Boost™ is likely the right fit if:
Your planning is an annual retreat or one-day meeting that never produces a decision or a plan.
Your department or division needs to align its priorities with a new organizational direction or corporate goal.
Your team is stuck or pulling in different directions, and you need everyone working from the same priorities
You're new to your role and need to align your leadership team or board on near-term priorities before committing to a longer planning effort.
Conditions are too uncertain for long-range planning, but your organization still needs clear direction for the next 12–18 months.
Many of the needs a Strategy Summit® addresses sound familiar, but a full planning engagement is more than your team needs right now.
Need a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan for your entire organization?
A Strategy Summit® is the better fit.
Who We Run Strategy Boost™ Workshops With
Companies
CEOs, division presidents, and department leaders who need their team aligned on near-term priorities or aligned with a new direction set at the corporate level. A new executive's first leadership retreat is often where a Strategy Boost™ does its most useful work.
Nonprofit & Mission-Driven Organizations
Executive directors and board chairs who need board and staff leadership agreeing on what comes next, especially after a leadership transition, a funding shift, or a period of disruption, when a long-range plan would be premature.
Academic Departments
Department chairs, physician leaders, and research directors whose annual retreat needs to produce decisions, not just discussion. A Strategy Boost™ is designed around the time your faculty can realistically give, alongside patient care, sponsored research, and teaching.
How a Strategy Boost™ Works
A Strategy Boost™ is typically completed within 45 days: a short ramp-up, the workshop, and a quick wrap-up.
Design and Prepare
30 days
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Agree on goals and participants
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Survey and interview key stakeholders and analyze your current plans and performance metrics.
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Prepare a targeted alignment assessment and design the workshop around the alignment challenges your team is facing.
Conduct the Strategy Workshop
1-2 days (in-person)
- Review the alignment assessment and agree on the current state.
- Define a near-term vision of success, clarify priorities, and make strategic agreements to align actions.
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Every team member participates fully; you lead running the meeting for us.
Document Agreements and Debrief
10 days
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Document your strategic agreements in Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™
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Debrief and outline operational priorities to match.
Planning is not the same for everyone.
The Strategy Boost™
Sometimes, a team, department, or smaller organization may be stuck or pulled in different directions. But it doesn't need a new long-term strategic plan to gain alignment; it just needs to agree on goals and priorities for the months ahead.
Strategy Boost™ or Strategy Summit®?
Same strategy expertise, different scope:
Strategy Boost™ |
Strategy Summit® |
|
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Strategic alignment | Long-term strategic direction |
| For | A team, department, division, board, or smaller organization | A company, nonprofit organization, or academic institution |
| Time to complete | Within 45 days | 8–12 months |
| Output | Strategic agreements and a Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™ | A multi-year strategic plan |
What Your Team Receives
- A targeted assessment of your current plans, performance, and priorities
- A custom-designed, facilitated 1–2 day strategy workshop, in person
- Documented strategic agreements your team has committed to
- A Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™: the next 30–90 days, the next six months, and the next 12–18 months
- A workshop report and a debrief with your design team
Scope, Timeline, and Investment
Planning horizon: Now (30–90 days), Next (six months), and Then (12–18 months).
Timeline: Typically completed within 45 days, including a 1–2 day in-person workshop.
Participation: A leadership team, department or division, board, or smaller organization; fewer stakeholders than a Strategy Summit®.
Investment: Starting at $28,000 for a one-day workshop for for-profit organizations. Multi-day formats and nonprofit and academic pricing are scoped per engagement.
What a Strategy Boost™ Won't Do
It won't update your organization's strategic direction or lay out an ambitious transformation; that's the work of a Strategy Summit®.
It isn't a training program, either: if your goal is building your team's strategic thinking skills, ask us about team training.
And it won't make your team's disagreements disappear. A good workshop brings them into the room so you can work through them.
What a Strategy Boost™ does is move a stuck or divided team to shared priorities and a documented plan to act on for the months ahead.
Why Teams Choose a Strategy Boost™
- Strategy expertise, not just meeting facilitation. Every workshop draws on the planning tools and methods Focused Momentum has refined over more than 25 years.
- A named strategist in charge of your workshop. Cecilia Lynch designs every workshop and leads the facilitation team that runs it, so your leaders can participate instead of running it.
- Decisions, documented. You leave with strategic agreements and a Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™, not a flip-chart summary.
- A path forward if you need it. Many organizations use a Strategy Boost™ as a first step before a Strategy Summit® or Implementation Support.
Many organizations do short-term strategic planning: they plan for three years, then reassess where they are before deciding what to focus on next.
We wanted a very powerful, bold vision to guide our mission into the future, and we are indeed much stronger and more sustainable because we took the longer view.
We chose Focused Momentum first because Cecilia brought a ton of experience, and she was really easy to talk to.
I think another key factor was finding someone who would feel confident and be direct working with strong A-type personalities associated with physicians. And we felt, and were correct in believing, she could do that.
Our founder is a classic entrepreneur; he has a founder's strategic mind and seems to operate from a gut-feel, strategy-guy approach. He struggles to translate his thoughts into a business plan. Using the Focused Momentum approach, we pulled those great ideas out of his head and built a plan the entire team could implement.
Clear direction for strategic planning and a really good focus on the big picture.
Great follow-through.
The Focused Momentum team facilitates conversations within the group without derailing them. They kept the group on track and allowed us to formulate our thoughts and objectives.
I realize our strategy session with Focused Momentum set us on a path to consider a different future than going it alone. Now, four years later, the future for our entity and staff is very bright. Cecilia and her team were an amazing force in facilitating our first real strategic planning process.
What’s refreshing about Cecilia is that she has been doing this for a long time and has seen it all. By drawing comparisons to other industries, business models, or cycles, she reveals things that you just can’t see. And she doesn’t hesitate; if you are off track, she tells you right away. For me, that was a phenomenal experience!
As my career has evolved, I have brought Focused Momentum along. In my last three organizations, she has helped me establish a common vision and a clear path forward with each new team. Cecilia has helped me make order out of chaos so that I could lead.
Great strategic framework! Cecilia has the best strategic mind I have ever worked with.
Cecilia does a terrific job guiding us through the process and pushing us to address the harder issues. The strategic planning session was very effective in helping us agree on a new mission statement, a framework for evaluating opportunities and making go/no-go decisions, and initiatives for programs and development.
The strategic clarity we now have has really boosted our team's performance because we have a documented plan. In our environment, we can get distracted easily because it's so complicated. Having a documented plan has really helped people focus on the task at hand.
Focused Momentum’s process guided us to reconnect with our mission and clarify our target market. This helped us evaluate what the client was asking us. Once we refocused on our target audience with a clear view of what we would and would not do for them, it became easier to position ourselves against competitors and increased our confidence – even when we had to say “no”.
Strategy Boost™ FAQs
A strategy workshop is a facilitated working session in which a team works through its strategic priorities and commits to decisions. A Strategy Boost™ builds that workshop into a short engagement, with preparation beforehand and documented alignment agreements using our Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™ afterward.
Strategy Boost™ engagements start at $28,000 for a one-day workshop for for-profit organizations. Multi-day formats and nonprofit and academic pricing are scoped per engagement.
It's typically completed within 45 days, including a short design and preparation period, a 1–2 day in-person workshop, and a short wrap-up to document agreements and debrief.
A Strategy Boost™ aligns a team, department, board, or smaller organization on near-term priorities and produces a Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™ covering the next 12–18 months. It doesn't change the organization's strategic direction. A Strategy Summit® produces a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan through broad stakeholder engagement over 8–12 months.
It can be, if the day is designed to produce decisions. Most retreats fall short because the preparation is thin and nothing is documented afterward. A Strategy Boost™ puts most of the work before and after the workshop, so the day itself is spent deciding.
Focused Momentum LLC's Founder and Chief Strategist, Cecilia Lynch, leads every Strategy Boost™, so your leaders can participate fully.
No. Strategic thinking training, such as the Strategic Thinking for Teams offered through Cecilia's training platform, Strategy Class®. This course teaches a team a framework to improve strategic thinking skills and applies this framework to one challenge during the training. A Strategy Boost™ is a consulting engagement: we assess your strategic alignment challenges, design the workshop around resolving these challenges, and document the strategic agreements using the Now, Next, Then Alignment Plan™.
Why Strategic Plans Fail, and How to Avoid It
Learn the three most common causes of strategic plan failure, and how to address them, before your next planning meeting.
Let's Talk About Your Next Planning Session
Tell us what your team needs to decide. We'll tell you honestly whether a Strategy Boost™, a Strategy Summit®, or something else is the right fit.