TurningPoint: A Better Approach to Strategy & Planning

Strategy can be a complex process, involving diverse stakeholders, many possible futures, and a dizzying range of options and possibilities. Yet in the end, strategy is also simple: It’s a plan of action to achieve a desired goal. 

TurningPoint is Junxion’s visioning and planning methodology. We blend practices of human-centred design, Appreciative Inquiry, business model design, impact evaluation, and more in a trusted, scalable approach that engages teams, inspires ambition, and delivers streamlined, practical plans. TurningPoint has been used by responsible corporations, NGOs, and social ventures to establish plans that are helping them break through to new levels of impact.

Three key principles guide our approach:

• Collaboration, which we define as cooperation across departments or organizations. You can expect lots of stakeholder engagement; juicy, generative conversations; and diligent ‘both/and’ thinking.
• Consilience, which is the purposeful collision of distinct ideas from different schools of thought. We’ll hold space for diverse perspectives and watch for the shared insights of best thinking.
• Connectedness, the friendships and collegiality so essential to productive work. Each of our clients looks back on TurningPoint as a profound, shared experience of camaraderie and connection.

For over a decade, TurningPoint has been driving insights, change, and success in incredible organizations around the world. So what does it involve?…

Diligent Initiation & Planning – Designing for Success

TurningPoint is most successful when it engages and involves a diverse range of stakeholders. So project design and planning is undertaken as an essential first step. For a smaller or earlier-stage organization, this might mean a meeting or two. For larger, more complex organizations, this might stretch to a couple of weeks of stakeholder engagement in design.

Deep Discovery – Assessing Strengths, Opportunities, and Momentum

While strategy is certainly about change and progress, any great plan begins with a full, clear understanding of the starting point. So we start by articulating the current state of each organization we support. Who are your stakeholders and how do they connect and relate to one another? What’s happening in your competitive or peer landscape? What’s happening in your community or the world that might fill your sails or blow you off course in the years ahead? And what do groups, teams, and individual leaders and managers think about your organization and its prospects?

We consider all of this and more, delivering the findings in a powerful facilitated dialogue that will ignite your team’s passion and creativity.

Strategy – Aligning Purpose, Aspirations, and Capacity

Our approach is anchored by a commitment to stakeholder participation. Plans that are developed by leaders and unveiled to teams rarely get the traction they might—because ‘power over’ no longer drives performance. Plans that are developed alongside and with the support of teams, managers, staff, and other stakeholders can drive profoundly more successful results—because ‘power with’ is an invitation to audacity.

Through a series of inspiring, engaging, and increasingly focused workshops, we’ll bring you and your team along on a journey of exploration, coalescing ideas and inspiration in a plan that will change how you define success.

We don’t believe in giant, 100-page plans. Yes, we’ll deliver reports and memos, so you have the background data in your archives. But plans are most effective when they provide a succinct, focused reference for leaders, managers, and staff. Why does your organization exist? How will your world be made better by its work? What are you uniquely focused on doing to bring about that vision? And how will you prioritize, resource, and measure the success of your work? Effective plans empower teams to implement efficiently, effectively, and successfully.

Plans must also embed measures of success. Every plan includes specific goals or objectives. Whether you prefer KPIs, OKRs, a Balanced Scorecard, or another model of measurement, we’ll flex to meet your preferences. What remains unwavering, though, is that we’re committed to ensuring you’re equipped to measure your progress and adjust course along the way. And this is not only financial success: we embed metrics that integrate environmental and social imperatives, tracking your impact, and even assessing your progress toward your purpose.

Have a read of some of our case studies and get in touch to learn how TurningPoint has been an invitation to audacious performance for dozens of our clients around the world.

And Let’s Be Audacious, Together…