Facilitation as a Key Skill for Strategists
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Facilitation as a Key Skill for Strategists: Turning Alignment Into Real Agreement to Avoid Transformation Failures
Strategy teams are prized for what they produce — the analysis, the frameworks, the five-year plan. Yet the work that decides whether any of it survives contact with the organization is rarely in the job description: getting the right people in the room, surfacing the disagreement no one wants to name, and moving a group of leaders to a decision they'll actually own.
That work is facilitation, and most strategists are never taught it.
This interactive roundtable will feature Alex Freidin, who leads enterprise strategy at ABM Industries, one of the largest facility services companies in the United States. Alex spent two decades in management consulting — at IBM and Grant Thornton, and across global aviation and public-policy work — before moving in-house to lead ABM's multi-year enterprise strategy program. He describes his role, and his legacy, in a single word: facilitator. His team operates as the organization's internal integrator, convening functions that don't naturally sit together and turning enterprise strategy into work the business owns and executes — a practice he has recently begun taking outside ABM's walls, into rooms full of people who don't report to him.
The conversation will examine facilitation as a discipline in its own right: how a strategist earns the convening role, how to run a room so that functions align rather than defer, and where the line sits between integrating the work and quietly doing it for everyone else — the trap that turns a strategy team into a project-management office.
As always, this will be an interactive dialogue, not a presentation. Members will engage directly with Alex, comparing how they each get their organizations to move together.
What We'll Cover:
Why implementation, not ideation, is where most strategy dies — and why that makes facilitation a core strategic skill rather than a soft one
Telling false alignment from real agreement — surfacing the disagreement a room is papering over, and driving it to a decision people will actually own
How a strategy leader earns the right to convene senior functions, and holds the room once they're in it
Keeping ownership and accountability with business leaders — integrating the work without slipping into doing it for them
Orchestrating dozens of parallel workstreams toward real choices, not just status updates
What changes when the facilitator's craft moves outside your own organization, to people who don't report to you
This session is designed for senior strategy and transformation leaders who suspect that their hardest problem isn't knowing the right answer, but getting the organization to move on it — and who want a sharper, more deliberate approach to the facilitation that makes strategy real.