The answer is: everyone who is allowed to make a decision of weight without first having to run it past someone else. That is usually the executive team plus the layer below it that sees the market most sharply — not the entire management layer, and not the executive team alone.
The reflex is often to keep the group small: three or four executives, done quickly, no noise. The risk of that is that you measure an average instead of a spread. A strategy review is only useful once that spread becomes visible.
At a company with 50 to 300 employees, the executive team usually consists of two to five people. They set the first self-plot: where does the organization stand on the five axes, and where should it stand. That plot is never a single point, even though it is often presented that way. It is five to ten points that lie spread out, and that spread is the first piece of information worth anything.
An executive team of four people who wholeheartedly agree on four of the five axes probably has too few different perspectives at the table, or too little sharpness in the conversation. One axis where opinions genuinely diverge — that is the signal the review revolves around.
Whether team leads or business unit managers take part depends on where decision-making authority lies. At a company with a strong executive team that itself operates the commercial and operational levers, a larger group mostly adds noise. At a company where the sales director, the operations manager and the director each have their own picture of the market — and don't share that picture with each other every week — something essential is missing if those three don't take part.
A practical example: a service provider with 120 employees initially only had the two owners fill in the self-plot. On the axis relating to customer concentration, they scored almost identically. When the commercial director later joined in as well, it turned out this person saw customer concentration as a far more urgent problem than the owners did. This person spoke weekly with the largest customers; the owners looked at the annual figures. Without that third voice, the difference in perception would never have come to the table.
The trends, regulations and competitive moves that are set against the self-plot don't come out of a working session with the executive team. That is a separate process, often automated, and the people who fill in the self-plot are not the same people who compile the outside view. Anyone who wants more clarification on this can read what outside-in thinking in practice means — it deliberately separates the view from outside from the view the executive team has of itself, precisely to prevent the latter from overwriting the former.
A strategy that turns out to be outdated is rarely recognized at the moment it becomes outdated. Signals of this — declining margins on a product that was once the engine, a competitor moving faster than expected, customers asking questions that used to never be asked — are picked up first by people close to execution, not by the executive team at the meeting table. Anyone who wants to know how you recognize that a strategy has become outdated will see that those signals often circulate for months before they reach the boardroom. That is precisely the argument for drawing the review group a little wider than the narrowest circle.
Anyone unsure whether a broader group is needed can first get an indication for themselves with the free mini-test of ten questions, which produces an initial pressure profile. That shows which axis carries the most pressure, and that is often enough already to determine who should be at the table next time.
Also important is the distinction between what is being discussed: a strategy review is about choices and direction, not about their execution. Anyone who wants that difference made sharp will find it worked out in the difference between a strategy and a plan. And because a choice that seems logical today can no longer be traced back to its underlying reason a year from now, it is worth reading how you record why you made a strategic choice — especially when the group that made the choice is larger than two people.
Once the review has been done and the pressure points are on the table, the next question is always the same: what does this concretely mean for the organization's Tuesday afternoon. Themes from a strategy review then become tasks, hours and systems, and only then does it become visible who will actually carry out which part of the decision agenda. Anyone who wants to work that out ends up at the work scan on ftetoai.com.
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Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.