Build strategic thinking skills

Think long-term, but move quickly

Live Virtual Workshop Series

High impact training that unleashes your team’s potential through hands-on learning applied to your work, your team and your goals. This is the ultimate learn on the go training for busy teams that want to move from overwhelm and uncertainty to solving & exploring with agility and speed.

Need to move beyond the overwhelm?

Need to move the energy from why we can’t, to how we can?

Need to stay productive through change?

And

Get.
Real.
Work.
Done.

Produce the results you know are possible!

Team Training Outcomes

Connect the dots to what matters

Focus energy on ideas & solutions

Build strategic muscle

Ask better questions

Find greater resilience

Think long-term, but move quickly

Build the thinking skills and capability you need to adapt and thrive

Practise 5 strategic thinking methods for creating and solving with an innovative and flexible mindset

5 Strategic Thinking Skills

Situate
Focus on what matters

Iterate
Experiment to learn

Calibrate
Go more when you learn more

Liberate
Explore widely,
beyond the known

Collaborate
Connect to create ideas

Virtual Workshop Series - Overview

  • Live, virtual team sessions

  • 6 weekly sessions @ 2 hours each

  • Via Zoom and with Miro whiteboard collaboration software

The Activate team training series is focused on building skills and capability. 

In these high impact sessions you’ll be doing hands-on learning and problem solving, using your team’s context – all activities will be relevant and relatable because they are dynamically applied to your team and your priorities.

Workshop Scheduling

  • Rolling Admission starting November 15th, 2022

  • Flexible session timing, custom team booking for same time each week, for 6 weeks

    Learn more about the design of team workshops:

1:1 Leader Sessions

During our first session together I’ll get a chance to learn about you and your business, as well as your team’s mandate, priorities and challenges.

During the wrap-up session we’ll absorb learnings and reflections and create a clear summary of the learning and accomplishments.

(During the team launch session we’ll work collaboratively to identify the areas, issues or projects the team wants use to gain practical experience with the 5 strategic thinking skills.)

Real-time learning you can apply right away

Build decision making
muscle

Build skills & confidence in strategic thinking, and feel the power of putting things into perspective, even under pressure. Turn change into opportunity.

Step into uncertainty
with greater comfort

Learn techniques for sizing and sensemaking that enable you to see possibilities with a solution mindset, even when there isn’t clarity. Respond quickly to changing conditions and make change easier to manage.

Use the tools to
learn the craft

Actively try out and use tools and visualization techniques to speed up and improve how you work together to make decisions, share information and learn as a team.

Learn more about visualization techniques.

Register your team

Maximize your team’s impact

Resolve real-world issues with your team

The team is a powerful unit of focus and action for building capability – the team has a natural line of sight to higher order business objectives and a frame for defining work and priorities.

This private team workshop series is for intact teams (a Leader and their reporting team.)

Build strategic muscle

Think long-term,

but move quickly

Meet Mary Daly

Team = Action

Why this training?

5 Powerful Tools

Power in Practice

Learn more about Mary and Activate in these 1 minute videos.

Register your team for Activate

Testimonials

Mary facilitated an iterative process and learning journey through which we created innovative ideas, built capacity, and ultimately resulted in our teams reaching their potential. 

Dean Smith, Head of Operations

Mary's curiosity and brilliant questions demystifies strategic thinking and unlocks the wisdom of the team to go through the strategic process from start to finish to maximize outcomes.

Rhonda St. Croix, Managing Director - Learning & Connecting

Mary helped me craft a vision and model for my team that built on our strengths and got us all rowing the right direction. Her contribution made her a valued strategic partner to our core business.

Kim Hanson (as) Head of Communications

Mary is a quick study with considerable experience, great intuition and an infectious, positive attitude.

Pamela Mills (as) Head of Facilities

Mary has an uncanny ability to bring simplicity to the complex.

Jeff Lucier, Executive Coach

A big part of Mary’s value comes from her broad range of knowledge and experience with many organizations in strategic planning, organizational design, org renewal and more. As a result, she sees both the big picture,and the small details and builds long-term relationships with everyone she works with.

Sue Kavanagh, Head of People

Mary is incredible! She is very goal-oriented and has excellent organizational skills. She's a fantastic communicator, listener, and creator.

Eloise D’Aubin, Coach

Insights & Advice from Seasoned Pro’s

The brief video capsules below are highlights of practical examples and experience from leaders who have developed and applied strategic thinking methods within their organizations.  In each of the live workshop sessions participants will learn from a wide array of leaders with diverse backgrounds and experiences who share their real-life stories in practising strategic thinking.  

Coming Soon

FAQ

  • This is a private workshop series for intact teams – for a leader and their direct reports. The workshop series is hands-on learning using your team’s context - all activities are relevant and relatable because we are dynamically relating the adaptive skill to your team.

    It could be a Director and their Managers, or a Manager and their reporting staff. It would be best suited for teams within organizations with over 100 people, and will be valuable in both the private and public sectors. The group size would be limited to 10 participants.

    The series is open to companies from all industries.

  • It’s different in a bunch of ways – both in terms of content and approach.

    The idea is that the skills you build in this workshop are immediately applicable, and the learning and guideposts are relevant and relatable. What I mean by that is … we won’t look at innovation at huge organizations like Disney, Amazon or Netflix. There are so many books and courses that rely on big company examples. This course is anchored in substantive and sophisticated innovation principles, but the context is close by and relatable – it’s your work, your team and your organization You won’t feel like ‘you can’t get there from here”.

    This is not a ‘watch a video’ course – it’s live training, coaching and learning. It’s not passive. You will be using and applying innovative practices and you’ll feel what it’s like to apply the strategic thinking methods in real life.

  • This workshop series is a skill-building approach to thinking with an open mindset, becoming fast and flexible, adjusting as you need to, to focus on what matters.

    The ‘what matters’ is a key strategic concept – making choices, at all levels of the organization, to improve the ability to achieve business goals. “Strategy” is sometimes seen as only being ‘at the top of the house’.

    This course is about building strategic thinking skills – building the ability to size and make sense of things, and venture into ‘hard’ thinking where there are no clear answers and the future is uncertain.

    This workshop series is not about creating THE strategy, it’s about learning 5 practical and specific strategic thinking skills that enable you to think strategically, at whatever level of the organization you are in.

  • There will be 6 weekly team sessions - I will work with you to choose a consistent 2 hour window for each week.

    1:1 Leadership Coaching sessions of 1 hour each will be flexibly scheduled with you to follow the team session each week.

  • Yes, but only in Ottawa at the moment. This collaborative and energetic training is perfect for hybrid teams that want to make the best use of their time together back in the office.

    Future offerings will include alternate formats for training offsites.

  • Yes! Every organization and every team needs the ability to adjust, absorb shocks and recover quickly. The 5 Strategic Thinking Skills align directly with the Canadian Federal PS Key Leadership Competencies. Give me a call and I can share a visual map with you.