The Strategic Pause
Our annual flagship conference, one room, six speakers, and eight hours of unhurried strategy conversation for one hundred and twenty senior practitioners who would rather think than react.
About the day
The Strategic Pause is the day we built the practice around. One hundred and twenty senior leaders, six commissioned talks, no sponsor stages, no exhibition hall, and a deliberately long lunch in the middle of the day.
Each speaker has been briefed by the chair for three months in advance, and every attendee receives a printed reader in the post two weeks before the event. The point is not novelty, and it is not headline names.
The point is to give you the company of peers who have read the same material in advance, the time to disagree in public without performing, and a chair who will not let any session run shallow. We programme The Strategic Pause once a year, in October, and the room is the product. The patron seats tend to go in May, the standard tickets close in August.
What you will leave with
- A shortlist of three strategic moves you intend to make before year end
- Direct contact with forty to sixty senior peers across sectors
- A printed reader you will quote from for the next twelve months
The chair
Former Chair, Holroyd Cleaver Group; non-executive across three FTSE 250 boards
Margaret Holroyd chaired a mid-cap engineering group for eleven years and has sat on three FTSE 250 boards since. She writes a quarterly note on board practice for a small private circulation, and is one of the few chairs who will say in public what most only say in private. She lives in the Welsh Marches and grows roses badly.
The schedule
-
09:00
Registration and coffee
Printed readers and name cards on the table. The chair opens at half past.
-
09:30
Chair’s framing
The case for slower thinking inside organisations that reward speed.
-
10:00
The cost of the always-on board
What two decades of board observation tell us about decisions made in the wrong rooms.
-
11:15
Reading the second memo
Why the most useful document in any organisation is the one written for the meeting after the one you are in.
-
12:30
Lunch, properly
Ninety minutes, seated, no panels. The phones stay in the cloakroom.
-
14:00
On attention as a professional discipline
A working talk on how senior operators protect their thinking time, in practice.
-
15:15
The negotiation you postponed
Case studies from cross-border commercial negotiations, with the names changed.
-
16:30
Closing conversation and Q and A
All speakers
Forty-five minutes, fully open floor, chaired.
-
17:30
Drinks until late
The bar is open until the conversations finish.
Tickets
Early
£580
Early bird
Released in May, capped at thirty seats. Includes printed reader and post-event booklet.
Standard
£880
Standard
Full programme, printed reader, lunch, drinks reception, and the post-event booklet.
Patron
£1,280
Patron
Front-table seating, pre-event dinner with two of the speakers on the evening of the fourteenth, and a year of priority booking.
Register
How to book
Booking is at the register form above. Payment is taken in full at the time of registration. The venue is Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London. If you have a question that needs a conversation rather than a thread, send us a sentence on the contact page and we will reply the same working day.