Urgency is nothing new.
Long have we defined our worth by our responsiveness. But today, that pressure has mutated. We aren’t just dealing with funding cycles or “VUCA” anymore, we’re facing a crush of accelerating contexts, from the affordability crisis to workforce collapse to political polarization to AI disruption.
The old saying has never been truer: when everything is urgent, nothing is strategic. We end up with burnout, decision fatigue, and mission drift. Strategic Shield is a structural intervention you can learn as a workshop, a talk, or a custom training. Whichever form you choose, you’ll be guided through a diagnostic of urgency in your organizational culture, as well as a set of practical frameworks to protect your team’s nervous systems and your organization’s North Star. You’ll bring a toolkit of the frameworks back to your team.
We’ll explore
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The Contexts: your specific, unique contexts, within the widespread contexts described above
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Cultural Diagnostics: the unwritten rules of your organization…who do we celebrate? Do we reward burnout as heroic, or do we reward impact through care for wellbeing?
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Trend Traps: moving from the “quick fix” trap (chasing new tools/trends) to strategic sequencing
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The Urgency Tax: how to measure the cost of urgency culture on your budget, quality, and equity outcomes
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Slow Lane Firewalls: how to design strategic friction to protect your mission’s sacred spaces (ethics, relationships, deep strategy) from being “optimized” away
Who Should Attend
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Leaders feeling the acceleration of urgency, and escalation of pressures on strategy and decision-making
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HR and People Leaders witnessing the impact of these contexts on staff retention and mental health
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Changemakers who know transformation can’t cost the relational trust and integrity the enables true impact
Instructor
