Perigon was founded to solve a problem I witnessed firsthand as an ExCo leader in UK financial services: business leaders are forced to think in quarters, but the game that really matters will be won over decades.
That gap — between the horizon the incentive structure demands and the horizon that actually determines whether a business survives and thrives — is where most strategic thinking breaks down. Not because the thinking is poor. Because it is aimed at the wrong timescale.
Before you can answer what strategy is, it helps to understand what it is being asked to navigate. We see four major long-term forces shaping the coming decades for every business operating today. The first is technology, specifically AI, which is no longer simply replacing physical capability or processing speed but beginning to replace human intelligence itself. The second is the reshaping of the geopolitical landscape, which felt abstract five years ago and feels considerably less so now. The third is demographics: changes to birth rates that are, for the first time in human history, beginning to invert population pyramids on a sustained basis. The fourth force, and the one where we have our deepest specialism, is that we have been exceeding our planetary boundaries, and that cannot continue if we want societies and economies that are in any way recognisable to what we enjoy today.
Most strategy processes do not take these forces seriously as central variables. They are treated as context at best, risk at worst — something noted in a slide at the beginning and then quietly set aside. That real work typically involves competitor benchmarking, market sizing, and macroeconomic charts. At ExCo level, everyone in the room already knows this material. It's a bowl of Heinz tomato soup: comforting, nice to have, but not ultimately going to give you strength or resilience.
So what is a strategy, when it works?
A strategy is a clear, shared view of the long-term moves worth making, based on a deep understanding of an organisation's place in the world, tested against genuine uncertainty, and translated into a small number of priorities that guide what that organisation does and does not do. There is not a commercial strategy and a people strategy and a tech strategy and a sustainability strategy. There is one strategy, and everything that matters — everything that needs to change — has to fit within it.
Two of the most powerful tools we use to build that view are rooted in sustainability disciplines. A double materiality assessment — to understand how an organisation interacts with the world — and a theory of change: starting with the long-term impact the organisation wants to make and working backwards through what needs to change to produce it. Working tomorrow backwards is considerably more powerful than working today forwards.
That view then has to be stress-tested. We build scenarios: multiple plausible futures that often look quite different from the natural inclinations of the board or ExCo. We use pre-mortems and the Rumsfeld Matrix — known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknowns — to help leadership teams get genuinely comfortable with deep uncertainty while remaining clear about what they can and should be doing right now with confidence and conviction. The goal is not to predict the future. It's to build the core capabilities to navigate whatever comes.
Then comes the hardest part. Every single company we have ever worked with is trying to do too many things. Strategy is routinely treated as an additive exercise — a question of what to start. The harder and more valuable question is what to stop. An organisation that knows precisely what it is not doing, and why, is in a fundamentally different position from one with a long list of priorities and no real basis for saying no.
There is also a people problem that rarely gets named directly. The CEOs of fast-growing, mid-sized businesses often have strong strategic instincts. But if the strategy lives only in the CEO's head, it does not scale — either across the business, or with the business as it grows. People sit in meetings where everyone sounds aligned, and execution drifts at the edges. The problem is not a lack of intelligence or effort. It is a strategy that was never designed to live outside the room it was concocted in.
This is why we talk about building a living system rather than completing a strategy project. When I was running a department in a large bank, we worked with the big-name external consultants. The teams were brilliant and the work was excellent. And then it lived in a PowerPoint deck — often sealed behind a long-forgotten password. That experience shaped everything about how we now work at Perigon. The thinking has to translate into a system that persists: accountability that is clear, horizons that are set, feedback loops that signal when the assumptions the strategy was built on are beginning to shift.
The test of a strategy is not whether it was well-reasoned when it was written. It is whether it is still shaping decisions a year later, in the room and out of it.
The bigger ambition behind all of this is not just better-run businesses. The structural backdrop of Western economies still very much rewards short-termism — in capital markets, in politics, in management incentives. Every business that makes the deliberate choice to think and operate on a longer horizon is, in a small way, making the argument for a different model. That is the game worth playing.
Perigon Partners works with mid-sized businesses and financial services firms on long-term strategy and sustainability. If your strategy is living on a shelf rather than in your organisation, get in touch.
You mention four long-term forces. How do I know which ones are most relevant to my business?
All four are relevant to every business, but they do not apply with equal urgency or in the same way. The starting point is understanding where your sector sits within each force: which ones represent an existential shift, which create commercial opportunity, and which are still distant enough to monitor rather than act on. You cannot know which forces matter most without doing the analytical work — that is what step one of our process is designed to produce.
What is a double materiality assessment and how is it used?
A double materiality assessment asks two questions across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons: what risks does the outside world pose to this business, and what impact does this business have on the world around it? We use it, with adaptations, as a strategic tool — it surfaces dependencies a company had not named, vulnerabilities it had not priced, and sources of value it had not articulated. These form the only useful starting point for deciding where the organisation wants to go.
How is long-term cyclical analysis more useful than benchmarking or projections?
Benchmarking tells you where you stand relative to competitors operating in the same conditions today. Long cycles — demographic transitions, debt supercycles, the arc of energy system change — shape the landscape that every near-term decision will eventually land in. We track where organisations sit within several of these cycles simultaneously, and what the interactions between them are likely to produce. Neither benchmarking nor projections can do that.
What is a theory of change, and how is it different from goal-setting?
Goal-setting starts with where you are and asks what you want to achieve. A theory of change starts with the long-term impact you want to make and works backwards through what needs to change to produce it. Working backwards from a future state forces you to confront intermediate steps that conventional goal-setting skips, including the things that need to change in the world around you — not just inside your organisation.
What does scenario analysis involve in practice?
It involves building a set of plausible futures your organisation may need to navigate, based on how the four long-term forces might interact, then stress-testing your intended moves against each one. The goal is not to predict which future will happen but to identify which strategic bets hold up across multiple futures and which rely on assumptions that may not hold. We also use tools like pre-mortems and the Rumsfeld Matrix to help leadership teams engage honestly with uncertainty rather than paper over it.
How do you get a strategy out of the CEO's head and into the organisation?
A strategy that exists only in the CEO's head is a set of personal convictions that have not been made legible to the people who need to act on them. The work involves making the logic explicit enough that people can apply it without asking, building it into the rhythms and governance of how the organisation operates, and creating accountability structures that mean it shapes decisions even when the CEO is not in the room. None of this happens in the strategy document — it happens in the handover and embedding work that most third-party strategy processes skip.
What do you mean by a living strategy system?
A living system is a strategy designed to persist and adapt rather than be completed and filed. It includes targets and KPIs set across multiple time horizons — twelve months, three to five years, and longer. It includes early warning indicators that signal when the assumptions the strategy was built on are beginning to shift, and clear accountability so the right people own the right things. The opposite of a living system is a PowerPoint board deck.
