I've just been told the strategy has changed and I have to reset everything by Friday.

What to do when the strategy changes and you have to reset by Friday

1985. Intel is bleeding money. Japanese competitors have undercut the business Intel was built on — memory chips — and the company is months from serious trouble. Andy Grove is sitting in a meeting with his co-founder, Gordon Moore, and he asks Moore a question. "If the board fired us both tomorrow and brought in a new CEO, what would that person do?"

Moore thinks about it. Then he says: "Get out of memory."

Grove looks at him and says: "Why don't we walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?"

They did. They abandoned the founding identity of the company — the thing Intel was famous for, the thing the entire business was organised around — and put everything behind a side project called microprocessors. It saved the company. And it built the Intel that went on to dominate personal computing for the next thirty years.

I tell you that story because the situation you're probably walking into right now rhymes with it. Maybe not in scale. But in shape.

So let's go and work through it.

"I've just been told the strategy has changed and I have to reset everything by Friday."

The feeling is whiplash.

Start by telling real urgency from manufactured panic

Before you do anything, you need to know which of two problems you're actually facing. Because they look identical from the outside, and they need opposite responses.

When the deadline is genuine

Choice one: Friday is real. The team genuinely cannot move until a direction lands. Customers are waiting, suppliers need answers, a launch window is closing. In that case, you give your team an hour — one hour — to produce thirty bad ideas as fast as they can think of them. Not good ideas. Bad ones. Because the thing that stalls teams under pressure is wanting to get it right before they've got anything at all. The quality shows up on the other side of the quantity, not instead of it.

When the deadline is really about optics

Choice two: Friday is panic. Someone senior needed to feel like they'd acted, and the deadline is the shape that feeling took. In that case you do the opposite. You ban your team from touching the new strategy for twenty-four hours. Not a delay. An instruction. Because the discomfort of an unresolved problem is exactly what makes people grab the first idea that walks past, and the first idea is almost never the one worth having. A day of deliberate nothing is cheaper than a week of undoing.

Working out which choice you're facing is the first move. Everything else follows from it.

How to rebuild the plan, step by step

Once you know which choice you're facing, there's a sequence. Three tools, in order.

Force eight rough ideas in eight minutes

The first is Crazy Eights.

Crazy Eights comes from the Google Ventures design sprint playbook — Jake Knapp and his team formalised it in the mid-2010s, drawing on Knapp's earlier facilitation work at Google.

The reason the tool exists is that teams under pressure to produce ideas tend to wait for someone else to say the first sensible one. The failure mode shows up most clearly in moments when teams feel watched — and a strategy reset is exactly that kind of moment.

The unique insight is that the time pressure does the work. You physically cannot produce eight ideas in eight minutes if you're editing them as you go. The mechanism removes the option of censoring.

What you get is divergence on the board in the first hour — bad ideas alongside good ones, all of them visible, none of them yet judged.

So. How to run it.

Fold. Each person folds an A4 sheet into eight rectangles. Pen, paper, no laptops. The physical sheet is part of the discipline.

Sketch. Eight minutes. One idea per box, one minute per box. Sketches, not sentences — words slow the hand down. Silence in the room.

Share. Round the table, each person walks through their eight in sixty seconds. No critique, no discussion. The point of the beat is to put everything on the wall.

The temptation will be to skip the timer. Don't. The eight-minute cap is the tool.

Separate making ideas from judging them

The second is Brainstorming.

Alex Osborn formalised Brainstorming in Applied Imagination, published in 1953. Osborn was an advertising executive at BBDO in New York, working on the problem of teams that produced ideas badly because they evaluated them too fast.

The reason the tool exists is the asymmetry between generation and judgement. The two cognitive moves use different parts of the brain and pull against each other — every idea immediately judged is an idea half-spoken.

The unique insight is the rule: separate generation from judgement. Get the ideas out first; judge them second. This seems obvious now, but the discipline of holding judgement back is harder than it looks. Most rooms collapse the two within thirty seconds.

What you get is a pool of ideas wide enough that the good ones aren't accidents. The judgement that follows has something to choose from rather than something to defend.

So. How to run it.

Generate. Twenty minutes. The room produces ideas without commentary on quality. No "yes, but." No early enthusiasm — that's a form of judgement too. The facilitator's only job is catching the first evaluative comment and putting it on hold.

Hold. A break. Five minutes. The list sits on the board untouched. The pause matters because it forces a register-shift before the second phase.

Judge. Now the room evaluates. Cluster, score, prune. Don't skip this — most brainstorms fail here, by ending at generate and leaving the room with a list rather than a decision.

Use it straight after Crazy Eights, when the bad ideas either become good ones or get buried honestly.

Shrink the brief until the team can move

The third is Planting Limits.

The lineage on Planting Limits is shared rather than singular. Stravinsky wrote in Poetics of Music in 1942 that constraint is what makes art possible. Charles and Ray Eames wrote about constraints as the designer's allies. The discipline runs through design thinking and product practice into team facilitation.

The reason the tool exists is that some teams stall on a generous brief. They don't lack capability or commitment — they lack edges. An open brief offers too many directions, and the team optimises for not-getting-it-wrong rather than for moving.

The unique insight is that severe constraint isn't a punishment, it's a release. A team that can't have everything has to decide what matters. The decisions surface immediately.

What you get is a brief the team can act on by tomorrow, not one they've been circling for a fortnight.

So. How to run it.

Cut. Halve the budget. Halve the timeline. Or both. Pick the cut that matters most for this team, on this work.

Restate. Rewrite the brief inside the new constraint. Same goal, smaller box. The restatement is the move — until the team writes it down, the cut is theoretical.

Compare. Hold the new brief next to the old one. The differences are what the team had been avoiding. They're the conversation worth having.

Use Planting Limits only when the team is stuck, not when it's productive. A productive team under arbitrary constraint will resent it; a stuck team will find air.

That's the toolkit. One more story before we close — the one that shows what a strategy reset looks like when someone bets the company on it.

A precedent: betting the company on a principle

June 1971. Katharine Graham is publisher of the Washington Post. The paper has just gone public — listed three days earlier on the New York Stock Exchange, the underwriters still completing the offering, the Graham family still the principal owners but no longer the only ones.

Graham is at home, hosting a farewell lunch for the paper's departing executive vice-president, when she is called to the phone. On the line is Ben Bradlee's house on North Street, where the editorial team and the lawyers are assembled writing copy. The New York Times has been under federal injunction for three days for publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Post has the same documents. Bradlee wants to publish.

The Post's lawyers are warning of three layered risks. Espionage Act prosecution against the company and against Graham personally. The loss of the paper's television licenses if a criminal conviction follows. And the underwriting agreement on the live IPO contains the customary clause giving the underwriters the right to walk away on material adverse litigation — which would collapse the offering. The chairman of the board, Graham's own long-standing legal counsel, is on the line. His answer to her direct question is hedged. "I guess I wouldn't."

One of her editors pushes back from the other side. "There's more than one way to destroy a newspaper."

Graham's account in her autobiography, Personal History, is unusually precise about the next moment. "Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, 'Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let's go. Let's publish.'"

The Post published the next morning. Twelve days later the Supreme Court ruled six to three that prior restraint was unconstitutional. The IPO completed. No charges were filed. The television licenses held.

The deeper point: symbolism before logistics

A strategy reset is sometimes a series of expensive signals before it's a series of operational changes. What you're willing to pay tells the team what you actually care about.

Grove abandoned what Intel was famous for. Graham bet the company on a single editorial principle, three days into the public listing. Same move at different scales — both about being willing to give something up to keep what counts.

What to ask yourself before the next meeting

So. Two questions.

What are you about to do in the next meeting because doing nothing feels worse than doing something?

And what would change if you waited a fortnight?