Inclusive Leadership: Integrating a Brain Trust into Your Strategy Process 

by Katharina Beck

In many companies, strategies are created behind closed doors by senior management. While they often look impressive on paper, they can resemble a shiny, sparkling unicorn—beautiful and inspiring, but hard to believe in. These strategies may comfort investors and management by giving them a “well-prepared” and “we are all moving forward towards the goal” feeling, but what happens after unveiling the strategy at an all-hands meeting?

Exactly—confusion.

Why Traditional Strategy Falls Short

When employees aren’t involved in the process, they often have pressing questions like:

• What does this mean for me and my team?
  
• Why did we shift focus, and what happens to our current work?
  
• Did they think about all the real challenges we face?
  
• How are we supposed to achieve these goals?

Even leadership teams can struggle to understand or believe in the strategy, especially if it feels disconnected from operational realities. Without clarity and buy-in, even the best strategies are doomed to fail.

What if the solution is hidden in your team?

Introducing the Brain Trust Approach—a method for crafting strategies that deliver real results and gain active support across the entire company.

What Is a Brain Trust?

A Brain Trust is a diverse group of individuals from across the organization, regardless of hierarchy or title. These are ambitious, open-minded experts and drivers with distinctive perspectives. Their collective intelligence fuels better decision-making, fosters innovation, and enhances engagement.

The Background of the Brain Trust Approach

A Brain Trust can be implemented for several reasons, but let’s focus on one key challenge: creating a solid, successful strategy. The idea is to include voices from all levels and functions, ensuring that the strategy is grounded in real-world insights, reflects the organization’s strengths and challenges, and secures full commitment from everyone. With the Brain Trust, you harness collective intelligence, creating an environment where collaboration, innovation, and trust thrive. This not only leads to better strategies but also fosters a healthier, more engaged organizational culture.

How to Get Started

1. Define a Clear Focus

A Brain Trust works best with a well-defined topic or goal. At first, you might hesitate to leave the entire strategy in their hands, but you may be surprised at how capable a diverse team of employees can be in shaping a winning strategy.

Provide a clear framework, such as:

• Growing revenue or market share
• Innovating a new service/product
• Increasing operational efficiency with limited budget
• Enhancing customer retention or reducing churn
• Implementing AI tools to streamline workflows

2. Set Measurable Objectives

Here are a few example objectives for a Brain Trust to tackle:

• Achieve X% growth by launching a new service line.
• Reduce churn rate to X%.
• Implement AI tools to save X% of time on repetitive tasks.
• Improve customer retention by X%.
• Increase average contract volume by X%.

Once the Brain Trust defines strategies to meet these goals, they should break them down across departments, identifying key activities, milestones, and objectives.

Unveiling the New Strategy

Strategies resonate more when presented by colleagues rather than distant senior management. It’s engaging to hear solutions from peers who have actively worked on shaping the company’s future. When a strategy is built collectively, employees naturally feel a stronger connection to it.

Over the years, my professional self grow steeply within a company living an open culture, where (nearly) everyone was part of the strategy creation process. Every voice was heard and every single idea counted. Through this culture, most employees enjoyed a learning curve that was steeper than in any other job. A culture like this doesn’t just improve strategy execution—it fosters learning, growth, and long-term commitment.

I’m passionate about discussing strategies, culture, and collective intelligence. If you share these interests, I’d love to hear your thoughts—let’s start a conversation!