George is an expert in Strategic Planning.
Strategic Thinking is not something that can be learned from textbooks or courses alone. Strategic thinking is also not something out of reach from anyone… it’s a skill like many others that needs to be developed through practice.
As George’s testimonials will attest, he has mastery in this practice. With over 25 years in international Strategic Thinking across all sectors, George works on some of our most complex opportunities and problems. He works with powerful and sometime difficult groups as well as dreamers and change makers to create alignment and give them the confidence to take action.
George teaches all of his teams and mentees that Strategic Thinking is like a puzzle. He sees the problems and all the information around it as a visual puzzle and likes to read, talk and draw as part of his work on. In doing so he shares the skills of Strategic Thinking with everyone he works with.
There are three elements to Strategic Thinking in George’s view:
Permission: This is the first Strategic Thinking skill in detaching yourself from operational pressures and allowing yourself to ‘look in from the outside’. It’s also about allowing yourself the physical and mental space to think.
Puzzling: This is the second Strategic Thinking skill of collecting all the information, experiences, data and opinion pieces and throwing them up onto a mental canvas to work with. Sometimes Puzzling is only about turning one piece a few degrees, other times its about shaking up the whole canvas. With all his years George says that “ most of the time Strategic Thinking is about patterns, recognising patterns and also recognising those that will and won’t work”
Practice: This third Strategic Thinking Skill is probably the most difficult. In this skill we review our ideas from Puzzling and fine tune them through the lens of implementation… “It’s a nice plan but can it be executed?”. This practical lens helps us refine future Puzzling and makes our best plans become our best executions.
Specialties:
Business Models | Value Proposition | Commercialisation
Competitive Strategy | Strategy Execution | Boards | Governance frameworks
Organisational Transformational and Transformational Change
“George brings a level of experience, energy, intelligence and wisdom that is a real ''value add'' and is hard to find. He has always delivered the outcomes I have sought, and I would certainly turn to George for further complex or hard work.”
Ronda Jacobs
CEO & Non-Executive Director
“George is not afraid to encourage fresh thinking and to question approaches that need to adapt to today’s fast changing context.”
Dr Catherine Brown
OAM & CEO