Live Strategy.

An organization runs a present system: a way of making value in a market, a business model, a set of offerings and an organization built to deliver them. At some point that system starts losing fit. A live strategy is the organization's theory of the system it wants to run next, and the work of getting there: the bets the theory rests on, the moves that test them, and the evidence that comes back.

A dead plan is finished the day it is signed. A live strategy is revised every fortnight on what the market did. The Strategy Ensemble plays it, people and agents together, and the Strategy Canvas keeps it: the theory, the bets, the moves and the evidence, current at any moment.

The method rests on three bodies of thinking.

• Strategy as a theory. The theory-based view treats forming a strategy as building a theory: the organization's own explanation of how it will create value in a world that does not exist yet. A good theory rests on beliefs others do not hold, because what everyone believes is already priced in. It names what must be true for it to hold, each of those claims becomes a bet with a threshold set in advance, and experiments in the market show which bets come true.
• Change as a transition. Three Horizons describes how change happens. The system an organization runs today slowly loses fit. The system that will replace it already exists in small pockets. Everything in between either builds toward the new system or gets pulled back into the old one.
• Strategy as design. System-shifting design says the problem, the theory and the pathway are made, not found in the maps: proposed rather than analysed, aimed at the deep structure of a system, its purpose, who holds power and where the resources flow, taking a stand, and looking for the smallest thing that can express a new system and grow.

The work runs through three systems, one after the other, and then keeps all three alive. Each is mapped at three levels, the market, the business and the offering, and at every level the map asks two questions: what wins, and who the organization has to be to win.

The loop keeps the strategy live: sense the world, make sense of it, make selections, make the call, repeat. Moves report against their bets, the theory is revised on the evidence, and the maps are redrawn before success turns the future system into the next present one.

All three frames have been around for years, and all three ask for more upkeep than a team can give. A tested theory needs its bets tracked, its evidence read and its surprises followed up. A transition needs three systems mapped at three levels and redrawn as they change. Done by hand, the maps go stale within months and the theory slides back into a deck.

That upkeep is what agents are good at. In the Strategy Ensemble they read the market and the organization's own material continuously, keep the maps current, draft theories and bets as options, track the evidence against every bet and flag what the theory did not predict. People choose the theory, make the calls and run the moves.

A theory of winning, the bets it rests on and the moves that test them, kept on the Strategy Canvas.

• Living StrategyA manifesto for strategy as an agentic, adaptive, living system.
• The Abductive AdvantageWhy strategy belongs to human-AI assemblages.
• The Strategy EnsembleWho plays it: people and agents, in pairs.
• The Strategy CanvasWhere it is played.