Last week I spent in Stavanger at the office of Engage/Innovate. With people from Costa Rica, Brazil, Ukraine, Germany and Norway we worked 5 days on becoming certified Master Trainer in Strategy Tools.

Strategy Tools is a complete system built in both analog and digital form to help companies deal with strategic transformation, to help startups grow and scale and for clusters to become aware of a paradigm shift from triple helix into a pentagon form.

For corporates, SMEs and companies there are series on ‘Strategy & Transformation’, ‘Innovation’, ‘Business Models’ and ‘Customer Development’. All in all there are some 70+ canvasses you can use in your strategic conversations with customers, clients, boards and startups/ entrepreneurs.

For startups you can work on the ‘Startup series’. Here you can find tools on building your long term funding roadmap for instance. There is really a strong focus in helping to understand how to use funding in the growth strategy of a small company. For me this was really an eyeopener in building the power of a supercluster where the strong economic factors are weighing in to develop the strength of the whole ecosystem.

Clusters can grow into superclusters when they work on the following parts in the ‘Supercluster’ and ‘Ecosystem’ series’. This helps in understanding how a large number of stakeholders are responsible for a joint effort and success of the cluster. I think there is still a lot of conversation necessary in the cluster I come from to help this idea to a larger audience. I think the tools can be a great communication tool that supports the discussion and talks between the different actors.

During the week we worked together with a group of 14 on sharing knowledge and experiences from our different careers in various settings of use cases and presentations.

Most of the time we split up in smaller groups to work of the challenges of the day.

Days started relatively early at 8.30 with a walk-in, coffee, discussion of the previous day and a planning of the day to come. Mutual dinners were planned and foreseen, but a lot went very differently from how we imagined it.

On one of the first days we decided to have food delivered and stayed working because we were all really enjoying the stuff we were working on. It was like that for most part of the week. Flexibility from everybody in delivering the most value for every participant in the training. So more than once we stayed till late in the evening discussion, working, laughing, eating, training, presenting and learning.

I have done a fair share of training in my professional life, but I can honestly say I never experienced such an enthusiasm and energy from a group with a willingness to learn and teach to each other. That was really something truly remarkable.

The week passed in no time obviously, but since then I have experienced and enjoyed a really profound change in how I approach conversations with the stakeholders in my ecosystem now. It’s more focused, more centered on ‘development’, be it on the customer site, their strategy, their product. I can even have a more meaningful conversation on their growth, planning or their funding. I hope to keep that flexibility of mind for a long time to come.

If you want to know more on this toolset and how to experience Strategy in a new way, please feel free to contact me.