Pact 1 of 6 · Shared Direction

Ambition Pact

Agenda PDF unavailable

The agreement about where we are going together, what we are here to achieve, and what we will give up to get there.

Overview

The Ambition Pact is the team's answer to a deceptively simple question: what are we, together, trying to achieve that none of us could achieve alone? Where it is strong, every member can articulate the same priority without reaching for a slide.

Ambition is not a strategy document. It is the lived, shared understanding of direction — including the trade-offs. A team that has never named what it will stop doing has not yet made its ambition real.

This pact also carries personal meaning. Senior teams sustain hard work when the ambition connects to something they care about, not only something they are measured on.

Signs of strength

•Members describe the top priority consistently and without prompting
•Explicit decisions exist about what the team will deprioritise
•Functional agendas are argued in service of the collective ambition
•The ambition is revisited deliberately, not assumed

Signs of strain

•Every priority is a top priority
•Strategy conversations become budget defence
•The three-year picture differs by person
•Ambition lives in a document nobody reopens

Questions worth asking

“If we succeed spectacularly over three years, what is different?”
“What are we willing to be worse at?”
“Whose ambition is this — ours, or the leader's?”

Workshop agenda

Half day (3.5 hours)

This agenda is currently being updated and is not available to run or download. It's shown here for reference only.

Outcome: A single written ambition statement, three explicit deprioritisations, and named owners for each strategic bet.

0:00
Frame & data walk-through
Review the team's Ambition Pact scores and alignment levels. Name what the spread is telling us before discussing content.
0:25
Silent write: the one priority
Each member writes, unaided, the single most important priority for the team right now. Read aloud without debate.
0:50
Convergence mapping
Cluster the statements. Where they diverge, capture the underlying assumption rather than arguing the wording.
1:20
Break
15 minutes.
1:35
Three-year picture
In pairs, describe success in three years in concrete, observable terms. Build a shared narrative on the wall.
2:15
The trade-off round
Force the question: what do we stop, slow, or hand off? Nothing leaves the room until three deprioritisations are named.
2:55
Meaning check
Each member answers: what in this ambition matters to me personally? Short, unedited responses.
3:15
Commitments & cadence
Draft the ambition statement, assign owners, and agree when the team will revisit it.

Materials

Pact dashboard printout · Wall space and cards · Ambition statement template

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