Strategy with Courage — A Different Way to Create Extraordinary Impact

Why Effective Strategy Matters.

Every organisation exists to create value or impact. Whether we serve communities, customers, or society more broadly, progress comes from making a real difference in people’s lives. Yet resources are always tight—time, energy, money, attention. We simply cannot afford to scatter our effort across too many priorities or dilute ourselves through activity that feels busy but doesn’t meaningfully shift the needle.

Effective strategy is how we choose what truly matters. It is how we direct scarce resources toward the few things that create the greatest value. At its best, strategy gives us purpose, focus, and courage. It helps us say this is where we are going and this is why it matters and to act with clarity instead of hesitation.

But this is increasingly difficult. The pace of change, the pressure for certainty, and the weight of expectations all make it tempting to fall back on familiar patterns: produce a polished document, plan every move in advance, or reassure ourselves with activity that looks credible but doesn’t challenge anything.

And that is exactly why we need a different approach—one that is braver, clearer, and rooted in deep thinking rather than surface-level planning.

Why We Get Strategy Wrong.

Most organisations don’t struggle because they lack commitment, or skill. They struggle because they fall into predictable traps that limit effectiveness and create strategy which is mundane and unlikely to lead to the breakthrough they seek.

We don’t make enough time for the thinking. True strategic thinking requires space, reflection, challenge, and imagination. Yet many teams are overwhelmed by delivery pressures. Thinking becomes a luxury squeezed between meetings. When thinking is rushed, clarity is lost.

We adopt fashionable concepts without considering fit. New frameworks, trends, and buzzwords come along every year. They often offer useful ideas—but when applied uncritically, they become noise. Organisations reshape language without reshaping decisions.

We rely on ‘common sense’ because it feels safer. Common sense can be helpful, but it often anchors us in yesterday’s logic. It pushes us toward the commonplace not distinctiveness.

We copy what others do. Imitation feels credible. It reduces risk. But strategy built on replication traps us within other people’s thinking.

We protect what we’ve already done. Strategies frequently become extensions of the past. We smooth the edges, keep what is familiar, and avoid confronting what isn’t working. We justify our past choices but limit future potential.

But we overlook the learning we already have. Our own experience, and that of our teams, stakeholders and customers and their successes, failures, and frontline knowledge contains deep wisdom that too often remains untapped. By failing to really interrogate our experience we miss the signals and patterns within the resource most readily available at our fingertips.

We leap into tactics without a clear direction. Teams often generate long lists of initiatives, projects, workstreams. But without a clear narrative—a compelling story that sets our direction—these actions drift. They compete for attention, energy, and resources. Movement happens, but progress doesn’t.

These traps are understandable. They arise from pressure, complexity, and good intentions. But they lead to strategies that are complicated on paper and unclear in practice. Strategies that feel safe but do not change much, that are lacking boldness. The courage to think differently, choose differently, and create the conditions for extraordinary impact.

What We Need to Do Differently.

A different kind of strategy is possible—one that is sharper, genuinely transformative. It doesn’t depend on a formulaic framework or method. It’s an approach, a way of thinking and acting which includes:

A clear directional narrative. Our shared narrative is the story of where we are going and why. It clarifies the difference we want to make, the place we want to get to. It sets the compass: everything we do either moves us in that direction, or it does not belong.

Insights developed by thinking deeply and drawing on experience. Insight unlocks change. It comes from sitting with the hard questions. From noticing patterns and hearing the signals. From learning honestly from what has worked—and what has not. From resisting the temptation to rush to action before understanding the landscape more fully.

Ruthlessly interrogated assumptions. Every strategic choice rests on beliefs, claims, and predictions. Some are well founded; others are wishful thinking. Effective strategy requires the discipline to challenge these assumptions openly: Where might we be wrong? What don’t we know? What could derail this? Where are we being overly optimistic? Courage comes not from blind confidence, but from confronting reality with honesty.

Action that aligns with the narrative and insights. Actions should not be a long list of everything that seems useful. They should be a small number of moves aligned with our narrative, putting insights into practice. Coherence is more powerful than volume.

Stepping out bravely. We cannot plan our way to impact. At some point, we must step forward—thoughtfully, but decisively. Not in reckless leaps, but in courageous, informed movements into new territory. Strategy becomes real only when we act.

Learn the way to effectiveness. No insight is perfect. No assumption is fully accurate and our narrative may change. What matters is not perfection but adaptation. We learn, adjust, recalibrate, and keep moving toward the extraordinary impact we seek.

This approach is not about producing long documents. It is about cultivating clarity, courage, and disciplined learning. It is about creating a living strategy—one that breathes, adapts, and grows stronger through real-world experience.

How change happens.

Free-Range Strategy is built on a belief that extraordinary impact requires extraordinary clarity and courage.

This approach means not arriving with answers, but putting in the time to think, to challenge assumptions as they surface, to shape the narrative, to design coherent action, to observe and adjust. For us, it means walking alongside teams as they try things, get stuck, change their minds, loose clarity and find it again. Learning our way forward together.

This way of working asks for trust, patience, courage, and willingness to sit with uncertainty. But it also allows the genuinely new to emerge and creates the necessary conditions for change that actually changes something.