Ask a team what comes to mind when they hear the word “strategy”, and the answers are often the same. Strategy is seen as something complex, complicated, fixed and top-down. A thick document written by a few people at the top, presented in a big meeting, then filed away in a drawer until next year.
During a strategic team retreat with an international organisation based in South Korea, we took the opposite approach. Our mantra was: “simplify to amplify”.
We kept one idea in mind throughout the retreat:
a strategy has to be concrete, but it is not cast in concrete. It should guide the team, not lock it in.
The methodology we proposed to the management was the bottom-up approach.
In other words, ideas and decisions can come from any level of the team and move upward, instead of flowing only from the top down.
The result?
A team that did not just receive a strategy, but built it, understood it and wanted to make it happen. In this article, we share why this approach works, real examples of companies that succeeded by listening to their people, and our practical tips to prepare, run and follow up on your own strategic retreat.
Why so many strategies stay on paper
The problem is rarely a lack of good ideas at the top. It is the gap between the strategy and the people who are supposed to bring it to life. Two well-known studies show how wide that gap can be.
- 95% of employees are unaware of, or do not understand, their company’s strategy, according to Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the creators of the Balanced Scorecard. As they point out, people who do not know the strategy can hardly help to implement it. (Kaplan and Norton, Harvard Business Review, 2005)
- Only 63% of the financial value promised by a strategy is delivered on average, according to research on nearly 200 companies by Michael Mankins and Richard Steele. Their very first rule to close the gap: keep the strategy simple and concrete. (Bain & Company / Harvard Business Review, 2005)
The same research suggests that companies which close this gap can boost their financial performance by 60% to 100%. That is a huge prize, and a lot of it depends on something very human: whether people understand the strategy, believe in it and feel it is theirs.
This is exactly where a bottom-up approach makes a difference. People rarely forget a strategy they helped to build.
Top-down or bottom-up: which one is right for your team?
Let us be clear: there is no right or wrong choice between a top-down and a bottom-up approach. It depends on your organisation, your team and your project. A crisis that needs a fast decision may call for a clear top-down direction. A long-term team strategy that needs commitment from everyone often benefits from a bottom-up process.
| Top-down strategy | Bottom-up strategy | |
|---|---|---|
| Where ideas come from | Senior management | Any level of the team, moving upward |
| Speed of decision | Fast to decide | Takes more time to build |
| Speed of implementation | Often slow: people need to be convinced | Often faster: people already own it |
| Ownership and engagement | Low to medium | High |
| Diversity of ideas | Limited to a few people | Wide: the people closest to clients and operations contribute |
| Best for | Crises, restructuring, urgent decisions | Team strategies, culture change, innovation |
In practice, many successful organisations combine both: leadership sets the direction and the boundaries, and the team builds the “how” together.
If you choose the bottom-up approach, the advantages are multiple:
- It empowers every team member. People feel trusted and responsible, not just informed.
- It fosters original ideas. Those closest to clients, partners and daily operations often see opportunities that management cannot see from above.
- It makes it easier to challenge the status quo. When everyone is invited to speak, “we have always done it this way” loses its power.
- It improves collaboration. Building a strategy together is itself a powerful team building exercise. People learn how their colleagues think and what they care about.
When ideas from every level built big successes
Bottom-up strategy is not a nice theory for small teams. Some of the world’s most successful organisations owe a large part of their success to it.
Toyota: 50 million ideas from the shop floor
Since 1951, Toyota has run its Creative Idea Suggestion System, which invites every employee to suggest improvements, no matter how small. Over seven decades, the system has collected around 50 million suggestions. (Toyota Times)
Already in 1973, Toyota’s 43,000 employees were expected to submit more than 250,000 suggestions in one year, and more than 70% of them were adopted. One single idea from a machine department saved the full working time of 15 employees. (Toyota, 1973 press release)
The lesson for your team: Toyota’s strength is not one brilliant plan from the top, but thousands of small improvements from the people who know the work best. Its famous continuous improvement culture, kaizen, is bottom-up by nature.
IBM: 150,000 people, 46,000 ideas, 10 new businesses
In 2006, IBM organised its InnovationJam, an online brainstorming event that brought together more than 150,000 people from 104 countries: employees, their families, clients, partners and researchers. Over two sessions of 72 hours, they posted more than 46,000 ideas. (IBM InnovationJam announcement, via Urenio)
IBM’s CEO then announced an investment of USD 100 million to launch ten new businesses based on the best ideas, including smart healthcare payment systems, real-time translation services and a new unit focused on environmental technologies. IBM had already used the same approach in 2003 with a “ValuesJam”, inviting employees to redefine the company’s core values together. (Information Age)
The lesson for your team: even a company with hundreds of thousands of employees can open its strategy to everyone, if the process is well designed and well facilitated.
Our client in South Korea: simplify to amplify
At a much smaller scale, this is the energy we looked for during our strategic retreat in South Korea: giving every team member a voice, and turning many ideas into a short, clear strategy owned by the whole team. That is what “simplify to amplify” means to us: fewer pages, more impact.
How to draft a bottom-up strategy: our tips
A successful strategic retreat is prepared long before the first workshop and continues long after the last one. Here are the tips we would like to share, step by step.
I. Before the strategic retreat
1. Define the terminology. Objectives, outcomes, results, achievements, indicators: these words mean different things to different people. Agree on simple definitions before the retreat and share them in a one-page glossary. You will save hours of confusion. For example:
- Vision: where we want to be in 3 to 5 years.
- Objective: what we want to achieve, in one clear sentence.
- Result: the measurable change we expect.
- Indicator: how we will know we got there.
2. Share the corporate strategy with everyone. A team strategy should never float on its own. Show how it links to the overall organisational strategy, so that every idea can be connected to the bigger picture.
3. Brief the team beforehand and give time to reflect. Send the key questions one or two weeks in advance. People who have had time to think bring better and bolder ideas, especially those who prefer to reflect before they speak.
4. Collect input early. A short anonymous survey before the retreat helps surface concerns and ideas that people might not share in front of the group. Questions like “What should we stop doing?” or “What is our biggest untapped opportunity?” work very well.
5. Choose the right place. Leave the office. A new environment opens new perspectives, and a retreat away from daily tasks gives people the mental space strategy needs.
II. During the strategic retreat
6. Define the rules of the retreat together. Start by agreeing on a few ground rules: phones away during workshops, every idea is welcome, we challenge ideas and not people, what is said in the room stays in the room. Rules created by the group are respected by the group.
7. Make sure everyone participates and speaks freely. Hierarchy has a way of slipping into the room. Use techniques that give every voice the same weight:
- silent brainstorming on sticky notes before any discussion,
- small groups mixing levels and departments,
- anonymous voting with dots to prioritise ideas,
- and managers who speak last, not first.
8. Start from the future, not from the problems. Ask: “Imagine it is three years from now and we have succeeded beyond expectations. What happened?” Working backward from a shared picture of success creates energy and ambition.
9. Simplify relentlessly. A bottom-up process generates many ideas. The art is to group, merge and choose. Aim for three to five strategic priorities, no more. As Mankins and Steele found, the first rule of a strategy that delivers is to keep it simple and concrete, and to say clearly what you will do and what you will not do.
10. Turn priorities into first steps. For each priority, agree on an owner, a first concrete action and a date. A strategy without a next step remains a wish.
11. Make room for fun and connection. Strategy work is intense. Moments of play, a shared dinner or an outdoor activity recharge the energy and strengthen the trust you need to make honest decisions together.
12. Work with facilitation experts. A neutral facilitator lets the manager take part as a team member instead of running the show. They keep time, balance the voices, manage tensions and make sure the day leads to decisions, not just discussions.
III. After the strategic retreat
13. Write a short overview of the long-term strategy. Summarise the vision, the three to five priorities and the first steps on a single page that anyone can understand in two minutes.
14. Keep the full document to 3 to 5 pages. If your strategy needs 40 pages to be explained, it will not be remembered. Short documents get read, shared and used.
15. Share it with the whole team and all stakeholders. Remember the 95% of employees who do not understand their company’s strategy. Do not let your team become part of that figure. Present the strategy to partners, other departments and management, and explain how it was built together.
16. Keep it alive. Review the priorities in your regular team meetings, celebrate the first results and hold a short check-in every quarter. A strategy is concrete, not cast in concrete: adjust it when reality changes.
17. Measure and adapt. Use the indicators you defined before the retreat to track progress. When something does not work, bring the team back together and ask the same bottom-up question: “What should we change?”
The Nexus way: strategy is a team sport
We love strategic retreats. There is a special moment, usually on the second day, when a team stops talking about “the strategy of management” and starts talking about “our strategy”. That shift is what we work for.
At Nexus, we design and facilitate strategic team retreats and team building days in Switzerland and abroad. We help you prepare the right questions, create a safe space where every voice counts, and turn a wealth of ideas into a simple, concrete strategy your team is proud of. Whether you choose a top-down, bottom-up or mixed approach, we adapt the method to your organisation, your team and your project.
Planning your next strategy retreat?
Contact Nexus to talk about your goals, or start with our Team check-up to see where your team stands today. Let’s simplify your strategy together, and amplify its impact.
