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# The Strategy / Culture Bicycle: one picture that replaces an infinite amount of bullshit
- URL: https://improvesomething.today/the-strategy-culture-bicycle/
- Published: 2023-01-11T16:00:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-09T17:20:05.000Z
- Description: A strategy method that gets right at the good stuff.
- Author: Brian Kerr
- Tags: Facilitation, #lightbox

Putting together a coherent, useful strategy for a group is hard.

- When strategy gets too complicated, intelligibility goes out the window. Nobody will adhere to a strategy they can’t remember. But…
- When strategy is too simple, it’s merely a container for people to toss their assumptions and pet projects into.
- And often a group is required to keep a strategy document in order to unlock funding, etc., even though nobody is excited to create it or use it.

Now—as a consultant—I’ve been called upon to create strategic plans and the like that I knew were going to collect dust. The complete and immediate uselessness of the strategy was a foregone conclusion. I’m not proud to say it, but I’ve flown across the country, eaten lousy hotel breakfasts with those weird runny eggs, and hosted elaborate multi-day sessions all in order to generate complicated, detailed strategic plans that nobody wanted, nobody used, and ultimately helped no-one. What a waste!

A couple years ago, in an effort to *never* do that again, I hit the books. Here’s what I found—it’s my go-to method to help a group of people generate and explain their strategy. 

The Strategy/Culture Bicycle:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0b/84/0b8469de-9291-421d-a2ea-8f6dac76e930/content/images/2023/01/Screenshot-2023-01-10-at-5.50.13-PM.png)

A wheel for Strategy. A wheel for Culture. And three questions on each wheel which can produce real, meaningful, shared understanding of a group’s intent. When guided by an attentive facilitator, you can get it done in an hour or two and create something amazing. (A detailed facilitator’s guide is available. It is excellent.)

*Not* part of the Strategy/Culture Bicycle: setting goals, establishing performance measurement, planning. But each of these are way easier to do once there’s consensus on thoughtful answers to these questions.

In my experience, Strategy/Culture Bicycle works for three reasons:

1. It cuts directly to the big questions without getting mired in a bunch of the inventory-making throat-clearing, fussing about contingency, or working backwards from preferred / “management-approved” actions that overtake many strategy efforts.
2. The inquiry-based affinity mapping that generates a Bicycle prevents any one person from defining strategy in a way that others can’t, or won’t, support. Autocracy is incoherent.
3. The Bicycle reminds us that a group needs to have both strategy and culture operating in parallel. Too many strategy documents exist in a timeless void, severed from the people and ways of being which might realize that strategy.

The Strategy/Culture Bicycle was created by Eugene Eric Kim and Amy Wu. I’m grateful for it. It’s in the public domain. Go for it: start with the [web-based intro](https://fasterthan20.com/toolkit/strategy-culture-bicycle/), then move onto the [detailed instructions](https://fasterthan20.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Bicycle%5FInstructions%5Fv2.0.pdf).

And here’s a secret: if you want to figure out who to become and where to go, you can prepare a Bicycle for yourself, by yourself. No lousy hotel breakfast required.