News Flash: Attending the 2025 Strategy Inc. Conference

Earlier this month we attended the first ever "Strategy Inc. conference - a two day interactive experience for strategists the world over. An opportunity for learning, reflection and connection with likeminded individuals involved in the world of strategy setting and execution.

With a central theme centred around the topic of 'Reinventing Strategy', the conference, held in Amsterdam, Holland, brought together an incredible array of people from all over the world. In just two days, we interacted and connected personally with people from Egypt, South Africa, Bahrain, India, Argentina, Nigeria, the US, Canada, Holland, Switzerland and China. It truly was a global affair.

A few of the key takeaways from the time spent immersed in strategic thinking included:

🇳🇱 “Organisations need to stay future ready in a changing world and strategy is key to that process.”

🇳🇱 “Strategy isn’t an annual event executive leaders get to participate in. It’s a year-round thing that all staff should be involved in.”

🇳🇱 “We need to stop thinking about ‘change management’ and start thinking about ‘transformation management’. We’re in a new era of change and transformation and our thinking needs to reflect that.”

🇳🇱 “If you aren't evaluating how AI will disrupt your industry, your’re going to be left behind.”

🇳🇱 “Strategy is not a direction, it’s a dialogue. Master the art of debating what your strategic priorities should be.”

🇳🇱 “Innovation doesn’t fail because of bad ideas. It fails when execution gets stuck.”

Attendance at this world first conference was fun. Not 100% what I thought it was going to be but interesting and insightful none the less. 

The people I met were incredible, and the conversations and various exchanges of opinion in coffee breaks or break out conversations were really enriching and insightful. 

It shows the power of doing different things, investing in your own personal development and in being fearless in stepping outside of your comfort zone from time to time. 

Aside from meeting people from all manner of countries, one particular highlight was finally getting to see Lego Serious Play in action.

I've long used Lego in my work as its a thing that people can't help but get excited about and engage with. But this explained the method behind the concept and showed the full potential this approach has. 

This approach gets people thinking with their hands not just their heads. It gets people thinking outside of the box and it gets people talking. It can be applied in a 1-2-1 setting, a team setting, or even in an organisation-wide context. 

What was interesting in this case was that while we were all given exactly the same set of resources, and given the exact same brief... not one person built the same end product and we all approached the exercise in our own unique and different ways. This led to interesting conversations and mind-expanding discoveries. It also bought a little joy and fun to the room. 

One question the conference kept returning back to over the two days was “What will tomorrow’s organisation look and feel like?”

Well whatever the answer might be, the process to reach that answer doesn't have to be boring. It turns out it can be full of brightly coloured plastic bricks and not just the usual flip charts, pens and sticky notes. Hurrah for Lego!

A few other models and diagrams that also caught my attention (although likely won't make complete sense in the reduced format shared here) are: