Open Strategising Certification: A Completely New Breed of the Executive MBA

Executive Summary

The Open Strategising Certification is a practice-based executive education system designed to develop strategy capability for leaders operating under conditions of uncertainty. It is positioned as an alternative to traditional executive MBA programmes, which tend to separate disciplines, prioritise analytical abstraction, and underemphasise the integration of strategy, realisation, and organisational learning.

The certification is built around the principle that strategy is not a planning exercise, but an ongoing organisational capability of making and revising choices about direction, resource allocation, and focus in real time. Participants work directly with live organisational challenges, combining structured frameworks, peer learning, and targeted AI-supported reflection to bridge the gap between analysis, synthesis and action.

Learning is organised through a structured methodology with defined outcomes and assessment criteria, while allowing full contextual variation in the problems addressed. A dual governance logic ensures consistency of strategy capability standards across cohorts, while preserving the complexity of real-world application.

The programme integrates strategic thinking, organisational realisation, and continuous experimentation into a single learning system. Participants move through iterative cycles of reflection, intervention, and evidence-based refinement within their own organisations, rather than working through detached case studies.

The outcome is the development of practical strategic judgement, the resolution of real organisational problems, and the emergence of improved ways of working within participants’ organisations. The certification is designed for leaders responsible for navigating complexity, making high-stakes trade-offs, and driving change in environments where stable answers and static plans are no longer sufficient.

Positioning, Governance and Design Principles

Why are we not launching yet another regular Executive MBA?

The answer is simple. Leaders and organisations do not need another generalist degree or leader; both require something far more surgical.

This is why we are introducing the Open Strategising Certification. It is a modern programme built for the current era—precise, flexible, and focused on practical application.

The depth of knowledge provided here is fully equivalent to an Executive MBA and comes with a certified diploma. The certification is governed as a structured methodology with defined learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and applied performance standards. It ensures consistency across cohorts while allowing full contextual flexibility in real-world applications.

Governance is based on a dual principle: standardisation of capability outcomes and variation of application contexts. All participants are assessed against shared criteria for strategic reasoning, intervention quality, and evidence-based reflection, while the specific organisational problems they work on are fully contextual. This ensures that the certification maintains methodological integrity without reducing the complexity of real-world environments. It also creates a comparable standard of strategy competence across industries and settings rather than standardised templates.

It is built differently: more applied and completely integrated across streams like strategy, change, economics, and leadership. In the real world, practice does not care if an issue is labelled finance, change management, or leadership; real business challenges do not live in academic silos. A pricing decision, for example, may simultaneously involve economics, organisational change, leadership communication, and operational execution, demanding a unified response.

Because of this, the entire programme is driven by one overarching challenge: How do you effectively manage limited resources to create value for others? To our knowledge, this is also the first strategy method standard being trained in and officially certified.

Conceptual Definition: Open Strategising

Open Strategising is a practice-based method for navigating strategy and change under conditions of uncertainty. It integrates strategic thinking, organisational realisation, and continuous learning into a single system of action. Rather than treating strategy as planning, analysis, or periodic review, it treats strategy as an ongoing capability of shaping direction through choices, trade-offs, and real-world experimentation.

Management Context and Problem Definition

In his book Managers Not MBAs, Henry Mintzberg argued that traditional MBAs overvalue analysis and functional abstraction while undervaluing the lived reality of managing. He was right. Traditional degrees offer too little integration, too little synthesis, and almost no real-world application.

Management is not an analytical puzzle to be solved from a distance; it is a hands-on practice shaped entirely by judgement, context, and experience. True management development must help you address actual challenges seamlessly, whether the problem involves improving operational performance, launching a new growth initiative, or aligning a divided leadership team around difficult trade-offs. You need a unified approach to solve it.

We part company with Mintzberg only in his conclusion. The answer is not to abandon advanced management education, but to move beyond the traditional, rigid MBA. We have completely redesigned the learning experience around the most critical gap in modern leadership: the capacity to strategise, practice strategy, and drive real change in a world that is unpredictable and shifting.

Core Discipline: Strategy as Practice

MBA programmes are typically designed to produce generalists, which made sense when environments and organisations were stable, and corporate roles were clearly bounded. Today, leaders do not lack general management knowledge. What they often lack is deep, practice-based competence in developing and realising strategy: deciding where to focus limited resources, what opportunities to pursue, what activities to stop, and how to mobilise people behind those choices.

In this context, strategy refers specifically to the ongoing process of making and revising choices about direction, resource allocation, and organisational focus under uncertainty, distinct from operational execution and administrative coordination.

Without this competence, organisations drift. They get lost in a sea of analysis, reports, and frenetic activity, yet remain paralysed by swift, uncertain change when it is time to make difficult choices, trade-offs, or sacrifices. Strategy is not a plan you produce once a year. Competitors enter markets, customer expectations shift, technologies emerge, and geopolitical conditions change. Direction must therefore be continuously refined rather than revisited only during the next planning cycle.

Applied Methodology

We are convinced that management should be treated as an applied, evidence-oriented field, closer to engineering or medicine than to social science. Classic MBA programmes often resemble traditional academic degrees—analytically elegant but detached from daily action.

To fix this, we have anchored our design in gold-standard learning and behavioural research, including landmark evidence on development interventions. This science proves that true organisational capability requires integrating thinking and doing.

In the Open Strategising Certification, these are woven into a single, cohesive experience driven by five clear pillars:

1. Preparation: You master the theory and core frameworks independently before group sessions begin.
2. Practice: You bring your live, real-world business challenges directly into the room. In one session, participants may evaluate a market expansion, in another redesign the business review process, and in a third navigate a major industry transformation.
3. Intervention: You actively execute micro-interventions in your business and observe the outcomes. This may involve testing a new decision-making process, reframing a market positioning narrative, experimenting with a customer segment, or redesigning a bundled business model.
4. Evidence: You use rich data from your organisation and the outside world to scrutinise assumptions.
5. Rigour: You apply critical thinking and validated management tools to real-life strategy challenges.

Learning System Architecture

The experience is intentionally designed to mirror the reality of strategy work rather than the rhythm of traditional education. Participants move between reflection, discussion, and realisation in cycles rather than long academic phases. A session may begin with uncertainty and incomplete information, move into structured sensemaking with peers, and end with concrete decisions shortly thereafter, tested in real organisational settings. Over time, participants see their organisations not as static systems to be analysed, but as evolving environments responding to deliberate interventions.

A typical learning cycle begins with a live organisational challenge. Participants prepare independently, explore the issue through structured frameworks and AI-supported reflection, and bring findings into peer discussions. Between sessions, they test practical interventions in their organisations and return with evidence of what succeeded or failed. In this way, learning and implementation become inseparable.

Strategy and change fail when treated as a closed leadership exercise. Modern research confirms that inclusion and transparency strengthen commitment, decision quality, and long-term performance. This programme prepares you to act as an orchestrator of strategy conversations and actual change. Whether leading a business unit, running a transformation programme, building a new venture, or guiding an executive team through uncertainty, the challenge is the same: creating alignment without suppressing valuable perspectives. You will learn how to open the process without losing focus, and how to lead change without diluting responsibility.

Human-AI Capability Augmentation

Executive development is often confused with training. Training builds standard skills and routines for predictable situations, whereas education develops strategic judgement for spaces where there are no clear rules.

Leaders today operate in uncertainty. Success depends on your ability to synthesise information, interpret weak signals, choose wisely, move forward and evaluate progress. Standard skills are merely the starting point; we are interested in developing leaders who can think clearly when the room is divided and the stakes are high.

To support this modern learning design, technology is used in targeted parts of the programme—not as a substitute for your judgement, but as a direct means of strengthening it.

• Phase 1 Exploration: You begin with a brief introduction to a problem and a guiding framework. Before meeting peers, you work independently with an AI agent to map your challenge, reflect, and uncover blind spots (for example, challenging competitor assumptions, identifying overlooked stakeholders, or revealing tensions between stated priorities and resource allocation).
• Peer Learning: Only after this discovery phase do you enter the active session to challenge assumptions and gain raw, valuable perspectives from peers facing similar struggles.
• Horizon Scanning: In other stages, AI helps you scan competitive horizons, stress-test your logic, and explore complex market scenarios.

This targeted integration ensures your learning remains completely embedded in real strategy work, teaching you to draw on hybrid intelligence—using the machine as an extended mind.

Strategy Differentiation Framework

The Open Strategising Certification is built around four distinct pillars designed for leaders working in dynamic, real-world environments, integrating them into a single operating model for strategy and change:

1. Strategy as practice: Strategy is treated as an ongoing capability of exploration, decision-making, and adaptation, not as a static planning exercise.
2. Evidence-based practice: Learning is grounded in live organisational and environmental data and real business challenges, ensuring ideas are continuously tested against reality.
3. Synthesis and wisdom: The focus is on integrated thinking across functions and contexts, developing practical wisdom rather than mastery of isolated tools.
4. Modern learning design: Blended formats, structured peer dialogue, and AI-supported reflection are used to deepen understanding and accelerate applied learning.

Organisational Impact Model

When structured this way, this programme delivers a concrete, fivefold return on investment:

1. Developed knowledge: You do not just memorise frameworks. You build genuine strategy literacy, practical wisdom, and the judgement required when resources are constrained, information is incomplete, and stakeholders disagree about the path forward.
2. Solved problems: Because the experience is built around your live business challenges, strategy work gets done. You solve operational problems and stress-test assumptions in real time.
3. Improved ways of working: Because you are continuously prototyping micro-interventions during the programme, new ways of working emerge organically over time. You do not have to wait for a slow, massive corporate rollout; your future operating model is built organically, one deliberate action at a time.
4. Shadow strategy: Because the programme addresses the critical strategy challenges research shows modern organisations must confront, you develop a robust shadow strategy. This serves a dual purpose: it actively stress-tests and challenges your current strategy while simultaneously evolving into your actual, viable strategy for the future.
5. Delivered improvements: Because the work happens inside your own organisation, the value does not stay with you as a participant. Your team, your business and your stakeholders see concrete improvements while the programme is still running.

For leaders responsible for direction and long-term value, this is not about acquiring another vanity qualification. It is about strengthening your capacity to think, decide, and lead in a world that will neither slow down nor become less complex.