This one‑day workshop helps coaches turn that insight and the book’s decision frameworks into a distinctive, sellable offering for senior leaders.
By the end of the day coaches will be able to:
- Use the Challenge and Strategic‑Decision Frameworks from the book as coaching tools with senior leaders.
- Help clients surface their “big six” legacy decisions and stress‑test them against four decades of CEO patterns.
- Translate those tools into a clear, market‑ready coaching product they can sell to CEOs, founders, and C‑suite teams.
09:00–09:30 – Welcome and positioning
Introduce the core research: 3,011 CEOs, 18,382 decisions across 40 years and seven eras. •Anchor the big idea: roughly six strategic decisions define a CEO’s legacy and identity. •Outcome framing: “Today you’ll leave with a product you can take to market, built on this evidence base.
09:30–10:45 – Module 1: The Six‑Decision Legacy as a coaching spine
Focus: turn the “six defining decisions” and tenure clock into a structured coaching narrative.
Content highlights: Typical CEO tenure (around five years) and why delay kills impact. The six decisions as a “quiet internal scoreboard” for leaders. How identity, future self, and purpose shape those decisions.
Exercises: “Letter to your future client”: coaches draft a one‑page letter, mirroring the book’s letters, laying out what they want a CEO client to remember about their six decisions. Map a sample client: identify 3–5 past big moves, ask “which of these were truly legacy‑shaping?” and “what’s missing from their six?”
Take‑away: a Six‑Decisions Coaching Journey outline (e.g., six sessions tied to six major decisions).
11:00–12:30 – Module 2: Using the Challenge Framework with clients
Focus: use the book’s 15 recurring challenges and 5 challenge domains as a diagnostic.
Content highlights: Fifteen recurring challenges and their long‑run frequencies (market rivalry, revenue and cost, digital, sustainability at the top). The five domains: External Environment & Market Forces, Customer & Society, Innovation & Technology, Operational & Organisational Complexity, People, Health & Capability.
Exercises: Client Challenge Map: coaches choose a current client and classify their top 5 issues into the fifteen challenges and five domains. Era alignment: match that client’s context to one of the seven eras (e.g., “Protect first, then rebuild”, “Leading the digital and stakeholder shift”, “Designing for resilience and humanity”).
Coaching tool created: a one‑page Challenge Map they can use in discovery or strategy sessions.
13:30–15:00 – Module 3: Strategic‑Decision Framework and archetypes in coaching
Focus: help coaches guide leaders on where to place their big bets.
Content highlights: Nineteen decision types, grouped into five Strategic‑Decision domains: Purpose & Responsibility, Growth & Market Strategy, Competitive Advantage & Value Creation, Organisational Excellence, Financial & Risk Stewardship. What CEOs actually do most: market expansion, digital leadership, MA, and rising CSR. How mis‑balanced portfolios (e.g., over‑indexing on diversification or financial engineering) destroy value.
Exercises: Decision Portfolio Map: coaches map a client’s last 5–10 major decisions into the 19 types and five domains, then compare informally to the overall pattern (e.g., underweight people leadership and protection; overweight cost‑cutting). Archetype taster: pick two decision types (e.g., digital leadership, divestiture) and use the archetype summaries to frame better questions about economics, risk, and sequencing.
Coaching tool created: a Decision Portfolio Map for “where your big decisions have really gone and what’s missing.”
15:15–16:15 – Module 4: Scenarios, expectations, and decision quality
Focus: deepen coaching around context and consequences.
Content highlights: Seven historical scenarios/eras, and why context shifts the right move (from globalisation waves to COVID shock to fragmented futures). 2025 “Fragmented Futures, Purpose‑Led Resilience” pattern: more crisis management, protection, structural change, reputation management; ESG and digital still present but less dominant. Expectations thinking: each decision type tends to have a distribution of outcomes, not a single predictable effect.
Exercises: Scenario naming: coaches create two short, named scenarios for a client (e.g., “Inflation Shock, Forced Simplification” vs “Selective Growth, Trust on Trial”) using the book’s scenario logic. •Expectation Canvas: for one upcoming client decision (e.g., market expansion, MA, CSR pivot), coaches sketch the central band, upside tail, and downside tail and prepare questions to help the leader think through that distribution.
Coaching tools created: a Scenario Brief sheet and a Decision Expectation Canvas template.
16:15–17:00 – Module 5: Design your market‑ready offer
Focus: turn the day’s tools into a sellable product.
1.Define the customer and problem 1.Ideal buyer: CEO, founder, or ExCoof a mid‑ to large‑scale firm under strategic pressure. 2.Pain: noise, decision fatigue, and unclear context; lack of disciplined, evidence‑based decision conversations.
2.Choose your format Options (you can propose multiple tiers): 1.“Six Decisions Strategy Lab”: three half‑day sessions using Challenge + Decision frameworks to define the client’s big six. 2.“Board‑Ready Decision Review”: a one‑day offsite to stress‑test a portfolio of major decisions using the frameworks and expectations canvas. 3.“CEO Decision Coaching Retainer”: six 1:1 sessions across a year, aligned with each of the six defining decisions.
3.Design the journey For one flagship offer, define: 1.Step 1: Diagnostic (Challenge Map + Decision Portfolio). 2.Step 2: Scenario and context session. 3.Step 3: Six‑decision focus and expectation setting. Step 4: Implementation check‑ins and recalibration.
4.Craft a simple promise
Example: “We help you identify and execute the six strategic decisions that will define your legacy, using evidence from 18,000 CEO decisions over 40 years.”
5.Commitment
Each coach identifies one real client or prospect and drafts a short outreach message or LinkedIn post positioning this new offer, ready to send within 7–14 days.
