Takeaways from Erik Schön talk at the Agile People Sweden Conference 2018

Some takeaways from Erik Schön talk at the Agile People Sweden Conference 2018.

  • Strategy gives an idea about direction and choice in order to sustainably thrive in a world with a high rate of change
  • Strategy is not about predicting the future. It’s about shaping and adapting to events and looking at future scenarios
  • Strategy emerges from experiments towards a goal. These experiments are carried out collaboratively by people in all parts of the organization


  • Sport is a good metaphor of strategy; people relate easily to sport
  • Go through small iterative choices; winning proposition, where to play, how to win, available capabilities, and enabling structures
  • Visualize your strategic value offerings through images and simple graphs; visualizations trigger conversations internally and with customers


  • In making strategy happen, both alignment (what and why) and autonomy (how) can be met (hint: recall aligning with corporate strategies in program management)
  • Alignment around (possibly co-created) intents enables maximum autonomy to take independent actions everywhere in the organization
  • Conduct regular strategy retrospectives, every sprint not just every quarter. In these retrospectives, look at your indicators, challenges, and business situation

#AgilePeople #AgilePeopleSweden #AgileGothenburg #Strategy #CorporateStrategy #CorporateObjective #ProgramOffice #PeopleOffice #Governance #GovernanceThemes #AdaptiveProgramManagement