Superhero Strategy
A workshop device that asks a team to describe their organisation's strategy as if it were a superhero - their power, their weakness, their villain, their mission - to get people who will not say things directly in strategy language to say them anyway.
Questions follow one after another, from power and weakness through to villain and mission.
Reach for this when…
- Strategy workshops produce polite, safe language and nobody names the real threat.
- A team is stuck in jargon and needs a different frame to think freshly about position.
- You need to open a session, not close one, and formal frameworks are killing the energy.
How to run it
- Ask the team: if this business were a superhero, what is their one real power?
- Ask what their weakness is, honestly, the thing that could take them down.
- Name the villain: the actual competitive or market threat, described plainly.
- Name the mission: what winning actually looks like, in one sentence.
- Translate the answers back into ordinary strategy language before you finish the session.
A worked example
Situation. Amina Wanjiku ran Wanjiku Logistics, a freight forwarding business in Nairobi, Kenya, whose leadership team's strategy workshops had produced the same vague 'customer-first' language for three years running.
Applied. She opened the next session with the superhero exercise, and the answers came fast and specific: the power was same-day customs clearance, the weakness was total dependence on two staff who knew the paperwork by heart, the villain was a larger competitor automating that exact process.
Result. The team left with a concrete priority - document the customs process before the two staff members left - that three years of formal strategy sessions had not surfaced.
The catch
It is a way into a conversation, not a strategy in itself, and a team that stays in superhero language never gets to a plan. It works best with a facilitator willing to translate the metaphor back into decisions; left as metaphor, it is just a fun hour. Some teams find it gimmicky and disengage rather than open up.
If the workshop ends with a superhero name and nothing else, you ran an icebreaker, not a strategy exercise.