interventions (policies and actions) to bring about transition from 1 to 2 by avoiding/overcoming/neutralising those impediments identified in 3. Regular review milestones, with specific data collection to ensure that the transition is on schedule and to help identify any unintended consequences of your interventions.  Don't assume it's all going swimmingly. A bit of a celebration when the 'place' identified at 2 has been reached.  Then start again. Stage 1, Ontology , can be a surprisingly revealing process; not at all as straightforward as it seems. Good data collection and analysis is as important here as it is at the more obvious stages. Ontology is the study of subjective being; having a long history in Philosophy, and being more recently co-opted by the IT industry . In this context it means capturing the essence of your organisation through data and remembering that there might be quite a difference between what you think your business is, and what it really is and does. Stage 2, Destination , is also harder than it looks.  Anyone who sits in a strategy development meeting and says: "We want to be the best at everything we do!" should be immediately shown the door and assigned to a job where they can't do any real harm.  This stage should be treated iteratively in conjunction with Stage 3, simply because some of the limiting factors etc. could be endemic, or even a by-product of some desirable characteristic of the business.  In other words, we may not desire, or