The Board asked you to revisit the strategy: we want an explicit answer to the question of how the company is planning to thrive and grow in the coming years, in a turbulent economic and fiercely competitive landscape, demanding a clear position on sustainability, war for talent and AI. Your (consultant) team works hard to consolidate a coherent strategy slide deck, built on convincing data that supports the choices you suggest to make. The last offsite, you did with your team in preparation to this strategy document, went rather well: the team seemed more or less aligned on the overall direction and the team building activity was memorable.
And still, you feel only partially satisfied: is the strategy you agreed on, really future-proof and robust enough? Did we truly consider different options, or are we just doing more of the same? Is it energising enough? Are we all aligned, and committed? And are we equipped to get on with the execution of the strategy?
Fast-forward six months—where are you now? Chances are, you see (weak) signs of the below-mentioned symptoms of reality already deviating from or running behind what you have in your strategic plan. (then dropdown menu?)
You hit a few of your objectives, yet the rest of the targets are only partially or not met. Performance is not convincing.
Priorities needed to shift, the market (re)acted completely not as anticipated.
Execution is slow, weighed down by a lack of ownership.
While the financial results seem OK at first sight, there are indications you are losing customers and competitiveness in the eyes of new target clients.
The competition has changed, your action plan has not.
Nobody is bothered by the strategy document and just focuses on today’s issues and crises in their part of the business, ensuring they reach their bonus targets.
Your team seems to have different interpretations of what the strategy really means.
Your competitors are copying your recipe or have brought radical innovations to the market, at price levels your cost base does not allow.
Your Board is questioning whether you should hire a (different) consultant to do a health check on your strategy, or whether to go fort a zero-base strategy approach.
A new acquisition target has been brought to the table by your banker, called ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity’ but you wonder if this is the right thing to do right now.
Sounds familiar?
You’re not alone. Most companies feel ‘there is something wrong with their strategy’. Even though there are ample strategy models, frameworks, or trainings around and there are piles of data to analyse, many strategies fail to deliver the performance ambitions they were projecting.
And the word strategy is increasingly associated with ‘difficult, expensive, external- consultant-taking-over, top down, conceptual, or a necessary evil’. Not quite what you expect from an effort to accelerate the growth of your business and your organisation.
Want to explore how to remedy this?
The Real Problem? Today’s environment demands a different way to make strategy happen.
What is wrong with (this way to do) strategy?
Too much value capturing, not enough value creating. Strategies focus on optimising yesterday’s and today’s margins instead of creating tomorrow’s market relevance in the eyes of target customers.
Too much strategy as a document, not enough strategy as a capacity for action. A static plan instead of an inherent capacity to make robust choices happen, rooted in common understanding and careful consideration.
Too much extrapolation, not enough reinvention. Protecting the status quo and projecting more of the same instead of architecting new pathways for growth in tomorrow’s landscape.
In a world which is changing faster than an annual review, you need a new approach to strategy—one that breaks through patterns instead of reinforcing them. And one that is creative, agile, and engaging.
Who We Work With
We partner with CEOs, executive teams, and Pattern Breakers—leaders who are not satisfied with playing the strategy game of yesterday but want to change the game entirely.
CEOs & C-Suite (of units or groups): Need to set a compelling direction while ensuring strategic execution doesn’t get lost in translation.
Strategy & Innovation Leaders: Must balance long-term bets with short-term relevance, without getting trapped in outdated frameworks.
Private Equity & Growth-Focused Investors: Seeking to support entrepreneurs in building resilient, high-growth companies that create and capture value.
Pattern Breakers & Market Disruptors: Those who refuse to accept that “this is just how our industry works.”
Our Perspective: Strategising is the leadership capacity to move together, to create and capture value, today and tomorrow
Most organisations treat strategy like a one-time exercise—developed in isolation by the happy few at the top, soaked in the data that (external, sometimes internal) analysts provided, then rolled out to an organisation that wasn’t part of the process and just needs to get on with ‘execution’.
That’s why so many strategies fail to create real impact.
We approach strategy differently:
From Strategy to Strategising. Instead of a fixed roadmap, we develop strategic capacity—the ability to continuously observe, explore, decide, and execute.
From Inside-Out to Outside-In. We anchor strategy in market dynamics, customer pull, and future trends rather than internal assumptions.
From Extrapolation to Breakthroughs. We don’t just optimise; we help leaders design (entirely) new paths for growth.
From Top-Down to Collective Intelligence. Strategy isn’t an elite sport. We create strategic agility across all levels in the organisation, ensuring alignment, input and involvement from the boardroom to the frontline.
How We Work: The ELP Approach to Strategy
We don’t just “do strategy” for you—we strategise with you and hence, build the lasting capacity to stay relevant, no matter how fast the world changes in ways nobody can predict today.
Our Approach: Breaking Through to a New Path forward
We start where you really are—not where the PowerPoint says you should be. And design a step-by-step approach that is fit for your purpose, not a copy-paste of our last project.
1. Seeing your Reality and Discovering your Context
Identifying the real questions and themes that the strategy needs to answer.
Identifying value drivers and leaks, hidden opportunities and untapped potential.
Surfacing the (collective) dominant logic and blind spots holding you back.
Exploring insights on customers, market and environmental dynamics, beyond industry benchmarks, and perspectives on the market drivers of tomorrow.
2. Exploring options for the future and deciding on the future direction
Exploring new and deliberately different strategic directions—not just incremental improvements, or short cuts to ‘the obvious way forward’.
Questioning assumptions, orthodoxies, and outdated narratives, to allow for unchartered territory to be discovered.
Creating testable hypotheses before making big bets.
Carefully weighing the options on deliberate and relevant criteria.
Ultimately bringing the options down to one coherent and consistent path forward.
3. Designing the Critical Path to make it happen
Defining the unique sequence of actions that drives your strategy forward, in tangible ways.
Engaging key teams on their specific contributions to success.
Developing agile, strategy-to-action rhythms that replace static or detailed planning.
4. Living the Strategy & Evolving It
Monitoring progress and friction points.
Embedding new ways of thinking, acting, and deciding, key to internalise the new strategy and operating model.
Course-correcting based on learning, not just reporting.
💡 This is not about handing you a playbook—it’s about ensuring you can write your own, and keep improving it in your own hands and at your own pace.
Some of our Success Cases & Impact
How we helped a leading B2B ecommerce players to set up their business for success, with major shifts in their business environment on the horizon.
How we helped an industrial company to scale up their business beyond doing more of the same.
How a global e-commerce giant overcame internal resistance to pivot their strategy toward a customer-first, digital future.
What We Leave Behind
We don’t just create clarity on your strategy today—we leave behind a company that can strategise tomorrow and beyond.
🧠 HEAD → Clear, sharp direction, deeply understood across the business, and consistent in its essence.
❤️ HEART → Conviction, excitement and confidence in the strategy, owned by leadership and entire organisation.
✋ HANDS → The ability to execute, learn, and refine—without external dependency.
Because the strategy isn’t a document—it’s a way of seeing, deciding and acting on your path to growth, every day.
Ready to Architect Your Next Breakthrough?
If you’re looking for a traditional consulting firm that confirms what you already believe, and focuses on producing extensive reports, we’re not for you.
But if you’re ready to truly grow your business with your people, break through old patterns, and create the future on your own terms, let’s talk.