Earn the Right Future

Your last strategy taught you something. Did anyone write it down?

Most leadership teams finish a strategic cycle and go straight into planning the next one. Another offsite, another set of priorities, the same blind spots. Earn the Right Future starts somewhere less comfortable: with what happened.

Book an Explore call

A question worth asking

Why don't you have it now?

I was in a boardroom in Sandton, Johannesburg, with my business partner Mark Richard, helping the executive team of a large bank set its OKRs for the year. The CEO leaned forward and said their priority was simple: primacy. They had plenty of clients, but not enough share of wallet.

Heads nodded around the table. Everyone was ready to move on to the how.

I put my hand up and asked if I could ask what might sound like a stupid question. Why don't you have primacy now?

The room went quiet. Then the CEO smiled and said: I think it's because we're letting our customers down.

That answer changed the work. Instead of chasing share of wallet, the team got honest about where they were failing customers, and found their onboarding was slow, cumbersome and well below the standard of their market. Fixing it became the objective. Primacy was the result it had to earn.

That's where the name of my book, and this practice, comes from. You don't get to declare a result. You earn the right to it.

We were with the leadership team of a SaaS business. They arrived with a finished strategy and wanted buy-in. Peter's instinct was to park the plan and do the slower work first: understand what is actually going on before deciding what to do about it. By lunchtime an engineer who hadn't said a word all morning named the problem everyone had been working around. The afternoon was about real options rather than a plan nobody could deliver.

Des Kennedy Founder, Applied Creativity Has worked alongside Peter with clients for years, and now partners with him on promoting Earn the Right Exit

How it works

Two doors. You decide when to go through the second.

Little door

Strategy Retrospective

A workshop with your leadership team on the last strategic cycle: a plain look at what happened against what was planned, before any new vision gets written. It puts the team in the learning zone, so you learn from the mistakes rather than repeat them, and it tests what you think you should do next before you commit to it.

It also tells us both, honestly, whether a bigger piece of work makes sense.

For: Leadership teams before the next planning cycle
You leave with: What the last cycle taught you, and a tested view of what to do next

OKR coaching programme

Taking what you learned into the new strategy, then using OKRs to drive the execution. I work alongside your leadership team as you set objectives that describe outcomes rather than projects, choose the few measures that prove progress, and build a review rhythm that keeps it alive when the day job pushes back.

Including the uncomfortable question of how much of the business still depends on one or two people.

For: SMEs and growing businesses with a leadership team ready to own the work
You get: A strategy you have tested, OKRs your team owns, and someone alongside you while it beds in

What I'll push you on

Jeff's wedding is not an objective

Years ago, running a workshop for sixty or seventy people, I gave each table half an hour to agree one OKR. One table proudly announced theirs: for Jeff to get married next year. Jeff (not his real name), who was sitting at the table and engaged, looked mildly mortified.

It was important, they said. I agreed. But the wedding is a project. What Jeff wants from it is happiness, a partnership, maybe a family. That's the outcome. If we wanted a key result, I suggested, we could measure Jeff's happiness now and again a year after the wedding.

The older people in the room laughed. Everyone remembered it.

Most OKRs I'm asked to look at are still somebody's wedding: a launch, a hire, a new system. Important, and not the point.

Before the next offsite, have the conversation.

Tell me where the business is and what the last strategy left behind. We'll work out together whether a retrospective is the right first step.

Book an Explore call