Strategic Thinking & Value Creation

Strengthen your ability to think clearly, solve tough problems and drive business impact. Apply structured tools to craft strategy, build business cases and make smarter decisions.

Video Briefs

Each Video Brief delivers a sharp, practical insight in under 15 minutes - designed to shift your thinking and sharpen your leadership. These focused sessions tackle real-world challenges across themes like mindset, strategy, communication and risk. Every brief includes a downloadable takeaway with clear actions, frameworks or reflection prompts - so you can apply what you’ve learned immediately.

Strategic thinking is not reserved for boardrooms or annual planning days - it’s a daily leadership discipline. In this High Impact Academy video briefing, we unpack what it really means to think strategically, how to avoid common traps and how to embed long-term, high-impact thinking into decisions made under pressure. If you want to lead with clarity, foresight and better judgment - this is where it starts.

Before budgets are blown or timelines slip, many business initiatives are quietly set up for failure by something deceptively simple -unrealistic expectations. This High Impact Academy video briefing shows leaders how to identify hidden expectation risks early, challenge untested commitments and build a stronger foundation for successful delivery. Whether you're launching a new program or rescuing one already under pressure, this briefing will equip you to lead with clarity, alignment and grounded confidence.

Identify the hidden factors that stall great ideas and learn how to fix them.

Get fast at seeing red flags that signal a doomed strategy before it’s too late.

Upgrade your decision-making with proven mental models that simplify complexity and spark better judgement.

Courses

High Impact Academy courses are designed for real-world learning - fast, focused and built for impact. Each course includes short video lessons, downloadable resources, practical tools, a knowledge check and a certificate of completion. Whether you're building new skills or deepening your capability, our structured courses help you apply what matters, where it matters.

Master essential problem-solving techniques to analyse challenges, uncover root causes and make data-driven decisions with confidence.

Learn how to deeply understand your customers and improve their experience using four essential tools to turn insight into action and drive performance.

This course will equip you with the principles, tools, and facilitation techniques to run effective Collaborative Process Mapping sessions. You’ll learn how to engage teams, map out current processes, identify inefficiencies, and design an improved future state. Whether you’re streamlining operations, improving customer experience, or driving business transformation, these skills will help you turn complexity into clarity.

Understanding market dynamics, industry competition and internal capabilities is essential for making informed, high-impact decisions. This course provides three powerful strategic frameworks - PEST Analysis, Porter’s Five Forces and SWOT Analysis - to help assess external trends, evaluate industry forces and develop winning business strategies.

Learn how to cut through noise, spot real competitive threats and uncover opportunities that give you a decisive edge.

This course provides a structured framework for rapid strategy development, covering market assessment, capability evaluation, and execution planning. You'll learn how to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and allocate resources effectively to maximise efficiency and business success. Designed for executives, business owners, and decision-makers, this course delivers practical tools and techniques to achieve a lasting competitive advantage.

Learn to confidently quantify and articulate business benefits to secure buy-in and drive results.

Identify what customers truly value, prioritise the drivers that matter most and shape offerings that win loyalty and growth.

Cut costs without sacrificing competitiveness with proven strategies to reduce expenses and drive growth.

Resources

Explore a curated library of high-impact resources designed to help you lead, think and work more effectively. From productivity tools and planning templates to leadership guides and executive slipsheets, every resource is built for clarity and action. Use them to solve problems faster, make smarter decisions and boost your personal and professional impact.

A practical, executive-level resource designed to help leaders drive customer-centric transformation in their organisations. It provides a structured approach to designing and implementing world-class customer experiences, integrating real-time customer insights, frontline engagement, and operational excellence. Use it to strengthen customer loyalty, enhance brand reputation, and embed a culture of continuous CX improvement. Gain clarity on executive responsibilities, leverage data-driven decision-making, and ensure a seamless customer journey across all touchpoints.

An executive-level resource designed to help non-financial leaders strengthen their financial acumen and lead with greater impact. It outlines essential principles and actionable guidance to interpret financial reports, drive performance, manage cost and cash flow, and make better strategic decisions. Use it to embed financial discipline across your organisation, build commercial confidence in your leadership team, and contribute more effectively to long-term value creation.

An executive-level resource designed to help leaders navigate complexity, solve root causes and drive sustainable change. It outlines essential principles and actionable guidance to see whole systems, spot patterns, identify leverage points and avoid common failure traps. Use it to build strategic clarity across your organisation, lead beyond quick fixes and make decisions that shape long-term impact, not just short-term wins.

An executive-level resource designed to help leaders link transformation to measurable value. It outlines a clear approach to defining, quantifying and realising benefits, supported by structured tracking and ownership. Use it to strengthen business cases, drive accountability and ensure your investments deliver real, visible outcomes - not just activity.

Create, manage and extract value from strategic partnerships and collaborative ventures.

A structured approach to tackling complex challenges, identifying opportunities and making informed strategic decisions. It helps leaders assess the big picture, evaluate options, anticipate risks and translate insights into action. Use it to sharpen your strategic thinking, align key stakeholders and drive high-impact decisions with confidence. Gain clarity, focus and a clear path forward.

High Impact Toolkit

A powerful collection of ready-to-use tools, templates and frameworks to solve business problems, shape strategy, drive performance and make smarter decisions -faster and with more impact.

The Business Diagnostic Findings Template is a structured framework for presenting key findings and observations from a business diagnostic phase. Designed to summarise analysis outcomes effectively, this template ensures clarity and engagement when reporting to key stakeholders. It is adaptable across various diagnostic exercises and assumes that underlying analysis provides supporting evidence for reference if needed.

The Customer Experience Design Framework is a structured yet flexible approach to analysing and improving customer experience. Use it to align customer journey improvements with strategic goals, ensuring that efforts are targeted for maximum return. This framework is best suited for future-state design exercises, where organisations seek to define their customer experience vision and prioritise improvement initiatives.

The Customer Persona Template is a structured tool for creating semi-fictional profiles that represent an organisation’s ideal customers. Based on research and data analysis, it helps businesses understand customer characteristics, behaviours, goals, and challenges to drive customer-focused decision-making. Use it to inform product and service design, guide market research, and optimise marketing strategies.

The Data Collection Plan Template is a structured framework designed to guide business analysts in gathering the right data to diagnose business problems effectively. By outlining data sources, collection methods, formats, and volumes, this template ensures a systematic approach to capturing current-state insights accurately.

The Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) Template is a structured method for identifying, analysing, and prioritising potential process failures that impact performance, output quality, and customer satisfaction. It systematically classifies failure modes based on severity, detectability, and likelihood, ensuring that critical risks are addressed effectively.

The Fast Track Strategy Method is a streamlined approach that aligns corporate capabilities with market conditions to develop clear strategic choices. Using a structured grid, it presents trends, strengths, weaknesses, and strategic choices on a single panel, making it easy for leadership teams to assess and align on key imperatives. This method encourages a collaborative approach, ensuring that strategic decisions account for both organisational strengths and weaknesses as well as market trends.

The Five Whys Method is a powerful and structured questioning technique used to uncover the true root cause of a business problem, rather than just addressing symptoms. By repeatedly asking “why” - typically five times or more - this method helps analysts and teams drill down to the real driver of performance issues.

The Future State Process Change Framework is a structured method for highlighting proposed process improvements and the initiatives required to implement them. Designed as a complement to the Process Issues Summary Template, this framework provides a clear and concise way to communicate recommended changes.

The Hypothesis-Capture Template is a structured framework for documenting and testing business hypotheses during an inductive analysis process. By systematically capturing hypotheses, evaluating evidence, and tracking validation outcomes, this template supports fast-paced discovery and strategic decision-making.

The Jidoka Method is a core pillar of Lean thinking, emphasising the immediate stoppage of production when an error or issue arises. This stoppage enables rapid problem identification, resolution, and error-proofing, ensuring that process inefficiencies and defects are addressed at the source.

The McKinsey 7S Framework is a powerful diagnostic and alignment tool for assessing organisational effectiveness and guiding strategic change. It explores seven interdependent elements - Strategy, Structure, Systems, Skills, Style, Staff and Shared Values - to evaluate whether they are aligned and reinforcing the desired direction.

The Pain Point Analysis Tool is a structured framework for identifying, assessing, and prioritising critical process issues within a business. By mapping pain points based on impact and frequency, this tool helps organisations focus improvement efforts where they will drive the greatest benefit.

The PEST Analysis Matrix is a structured framework for outlining critical market trends, identifying how they manifest as opportunities or threats, and defining strategies to respond effectively. Designed for use in strategic analysis exercises, this template synthesises key market insights in a format that can be seamlessly included in a market assessment report.

The Process Flow Analysis Template is a structured approach for mapping end-to-end processes, highlighting performance issues and identifying opportunities for improvement. It enables organisations to capture key process attributes, including inputs, outputs, steps, and resources, while pinpointing areas experiencing pain points.

The Process Issues Summary Template is a concise framework for outlining key roles, steps, and tasks involved in executing a process from end to end, along with the critical issues impacting its performance. Use it to summarise key process attributes and highlight major pain points at the conclusion of a process analysis.

The Recommendations Framework is a structured and straightforward template for capturing and presenting business transformation or improvement recommendations. It ensures that essential details - including rationale, implications, and considerations - are clearly articulated for stakeholder review and decision-making.

The Fishbone Root Cause Analysis Method is a structured technique for identifying and analysing business problems, drilling down to uncover their true root causes. This qualitative method engages stakeholders with operational knowledge, facilitating discussions on symptoms, potential causes, and prioritisation of areas requiring further investigation.

The SIPOC Process Mapping Tool provides a structured method for capturing and visualising the key elements of an end-to-end business process, ensuring clarity on how value is delivered to customers.

The Situation Complication Resolution (SCR) Framework is a structured, single-page approach for clearly articulating a business situation, an imminent challenge, and the necessary actions to address it. Comprised of three distinct components, the framework provides a logical and concise method for framing and solving critical business dilemmas.

The Solution Assessment Method is a structured approach for evaluating and prioritising business improvement solutions across key dimensions. It provides an objective framework to assess potential initiatives, ensuring that solutions effectively address business performance issues and root causes.

The Solution Ideation and Ranking Method is a structured approach for brainstorming, evaluating, and prioritising business improvement initiatives. Using a scoring system, this method assesses potential projects based on their positive impact against targeted business metrics, ensuring alignment with key performance improvement areas.

The Strategy Pyramid Framework is a structured tool designed to develop and align business strategy, ensuring a clear connection between mission, vision, values, and actionable objectives across all levels of an organisation. This proven strategic planning model follows Hoshin Kanri principles, ensuring goal alignment and execution clarity.

The Swim Lane Process Map is a structured and logical method for visually mapping business or operational processes, providing clarity on process actors, decision points, steps, and sequential flows. It accommodates notations and highlights, allowing for the identification of process deficiencies, volume data, and improvement opportunities.

The Business Transformation Framework is a structured five-component methodology designed to guide the design and execution of a business transformation program. It begins with a clear Transformation Vision and concludes with Metrics and Governance, ensuring that execution is effectively managed and success is measured.

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