Adaptive Strategy

Date: 3rd and 4th November 2025

Modality:  In-person

Duration: Two days, 9:00am-4:00pm

Price: $2,409 (incl. GST). If you are eligible for the UoA Staff or Auckland Council Training Member discount, please email shortcourses@auckland.ac.nz.

Short course structure and topics covered: 

Traditional strategic processes and planning are becoming less relevant in a world that is constantly and disruptively changing. Adaptive Strategy, a method for exploring and making strategic decisions in rapidly changing environments is based on sound scientific principles of complex adaptive systems theory, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience. It doesn’t discard traditional strategic planning but adds another dimension to enable organisations to adapt and thrive.

Adaptive Strategy helps organisations to turn uncertainty into a strategic advantage. Thinking of strategy this way provides the platform for unleashing innovation and organisational resilience.

Through the course you will learn how to:

• Distinguish between obvious, complicated, complex, and chaotic challenges and determine how to plan and lead each of these appropriately.
•  Stimulate innovation, build social networks, and engage stakeholders in more effective knowledge exchange.
•  Set meaningful goals, clear measures and timely objectives and key results
• Develop and lead dynamic, self-motivated teams focused on outcomes.
• Implement sustainable change and overcome barriers to agility.

At the end of this two-day course, participants will have a strategic plan outline for creating and leading their team or organisation. The course will start by introducing core concepts, models and thinking then progress to applying that thinking to real-life challenges.

Day One

• Strategy: The past and the present.
• Explore the principles and realities of managing and leading within a complex environment and why traditional strategy development process may not work well.
• Introduction to the Cynefin framework for management decision making.
• Explore methods to increase sensitivity in your team and organisation to strategic ‘clues’ – what is at the edge that you might need to pay attention to and how.

Day Two

• Review of the model and practices needed to undertake adaptive strategy.
• How to think about goal setting and KPI’s within uncertain and complex environments.
• Learn by doing, to apply the model using real challenges as the basis for experimentation.
• Learn the key requirements for learning an agile organisation and how to think about your own organisation.

Learning outcomes: 

By the end of the course you will have:

• Practised the techniques needed to create an adaptive strategy.
• Understood the principles of creating and leading agile organisations.
• Recognised and addressed the barriers to achieving agility.
• Developed an outline strategic plan for use within your organisation. 

Your organisation will benefit from your ability to:

• Develop adaptive strategies.
• Overcome constraints to operating in an agile manner.
• Create a systematic approach to early detection, fast response, and successful exploitation of opportunity.
• Initiate real organisational change.

Who should attend?

• Leaders who have found that traditional strategy processes are not as useful as they once were.
• Leaders who know that strategy is important but who want to know how to do strategy in complex, fast changing environments.
• Entrepreneurs wanting to learn and embed a way of strategic decision making in their companies that will enable growth and responsiveness to the market.

If you would like to inquire about this course being run inhouse, please email shortcourses@auckland.ac.nz

Payment for short courses is normally by credit card. If you need to pay by invoice or require assistance, please email shortcourses@auckland.ac.nz. Please note that the University does not issue individual invoices for amounts less than $500 New Zealand dollars.