Strategic Thinking and Planning

Strategic Thinking and Planning is a 5-day senior strategy course delivered by Mars Training Centre UK at our international training centres — London, Dubai, Amsterdam, Vienna and Kuala Lumpur, with selected dates online — designed for directors and senior managers who own a part of their organisation's strategy and need a sharper way of thinking about it.

Most strategic plans fail not in the writing but in the thinking. Leaders are pulled into operational detail, react to the loudest stakeholder, and confuse activity with progress. The result is a plan that reads well on slide twelve and quietly disintegrates in the second quarter. This programme is built for senior managers and directors who want to step back from the operating cadence, restore the discipline of strategic thinking, and produce a plan their organisation can actually execute.

Across five focused days, you will work through the major strategy frameworks used in British and international business — Porter, PESTLE, the resource-based view, Blue Ocean, scenario thinking — apply them to real cases drawn from British, European, Gulf and Asian organisations, and build a strategic plan for an area of your own organisation. The programme is delivered by senior practitioners with executive and consulting experience.

What You Will Learn

• Apply structured strategic-thinking frameworks to complex business problems.
• Diagnose the external environment using PESTLE, Porter's Five Forces and industry-evolution analysis.
• Analyse internal capabilities using the resource-based view and value-chain thinking.
• Generate and evaluate strategic options using a disciplined choice framework.
• Build a strategic plan that connects ambition, capability and the operating model.
• Design and run a strategic planning cycle that fits your organisation's calendar.
• Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, and use both deliberately.
• Communicate strategy clearly to boards, peers and the wider workforce.
• Avoid the most common strategic-planning failure modes in mid-size and large organisations.

How You Will Benefit

You will leave with a working strategic plan for an area of your own business, a sharper instinct for the strategic question beneath the operational noise, and a Mars Certificate of Completion.

Your organisation will gain a senior manager who can lead structured strategic conversations, challenge weak assumptions in board papers, and produce strategic plans that connect to the operating reality rather than sitting in a binder.

Who This Programme Is For

This programme is designed for senior leaders involved in setting or shaping organisational strategy, including:

• Directors of strategy, planning and corporate development
• Heads of business units and country managers
• General managers preparing for executive promotion
• Senior managers in commercial, operations and finance functions
• Family-business principals shaping the next planning cycle
• Senior public-sector officials leading sectoral or institutional planning
• Senior consultants advising on strategy mandates

The seniority floor is senior manager and above. The course is delivered in person over five consecutive days and carries a fee of £4,950.