Over the past eighteen months the County of Wellington has done the hard, unglamorous work of strategy. It is finalizing the 2025–2035 update to its “A Place to Call Home” Housing and Homelessness Plan, it has secured Ministry approval to expand its urban boundaries to 2051 under Official Plan Amendment 126, it has adopted a rural-growth framework under OPA 131, and it has moved a $7-million capital fund out of a single stalled megaproject and into seven lower-tier municipalities and their non-profit partners.1 The plans exist. The capital is committed. The targets are set. By the standard most municipalities are held to, Wellington has already done the difficult part.
What the first half of 2026 reveals is that the binding constraint is no longer analysis or capital. It is coordination. In challenge after challenge, the County holds the mandate but not the levers: lower-tier townships control the zoning, developers control the construction decision, the City of Guelph controls half of the social-services budget, and neighbouring municipalities control whether a rural-growth policy is seen as fair. The County functions as the Consolidated Municipal Service Manager for both Wellington County and the City of Guelph, which means almost nothing it wants to execute can be executed by the County alone.1 Its housing strategy is gated not by what is known, but by whether the right constraint owners will sit in one room and resolve trade-offs they have so far only deferred.
Four signals make the point concrete. A private affordable-townhouse project in Drayton was forced into a lower-density, higher-priced design by a township’s frontage and lot-size bylaws — nullifying a regional affordability target at the point of execution.2 Centre Wellington froze a proposed development-charge increase for six months after the development community warned that the jump would halt construction outright, leaving a $36-million infrastructure deficit unfunded and a hard clock running to October 2026.3 The adoption of OPA 131 generated public claims of discriminatory treatment between neighbouring townships over lot-severance rules.4 And in May 2026 a 4:4 deadlock on the Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee rejected a budget increase, putting a $650,000 cut to the Housing Stability Rent Support program on the table — a cut that would push some of the 321 households it supports back toward an already overwhelmed shelter system.5
This brief maps eight current challenges that carry the same structural signature — multiple constraint owners, a real deadline, broad agreement that never hardens into binding commitment, and a funded strategy that has not converted into coordinated action. It then works through two of them in detail — breaking the Joint Social Services budget deadlock and unblocking the Centre Wellington development-charge freeze — to show what a decision-forcing process produces at each stage that sequential consultation and committee process do not. The argument is straightforward. Wellington has supplied the strategy and the capital. What its most urgent files now require is a room structured to force the trade-offs that remain unresolved.
The operational reality of Wellington County in 2026 is defined by friction — the friction generated when provincial mandates and upper-tier strategy collide with the local infrastructure, zoning, and fiscal constraints of seven lower-tier townships and one independent city. The County sits at the centre of a complex governance web. It must satisfy the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing on population and employment forecasts to 2051, administer social housing and the centralized waiting list, and coordinate homelessness programs — while relying entirely on the lower tiers and the City of Guelph to deliver the land, the services, and the buildings.1 The result is acute execution risk that no amount of additional strategy will dissolve.
This distinction changes what counts as progress. A well-run consultation identifies what the community wants and produces a defensible plan. It does not, by design, require the people who control the constraints to resolve their trade-offs in a binding setting. The County is not unusual in facing this handoff. If anything, the ambition of its current agenda — a refreshed ten-year plan, two major official-plan amendments, a decentralized capital strategy, and an escalating homelessness response — throws the line between a planned strategy and a coordinated one into unusually sharp relief.
It is worth being precise about why planning alone does not close this kind of gap. A plan removes ambiguity about intent; in many settings that is the dominant constraint. But the constraints that remain after the plan is adopted are relational and institutional: a township that will not absorb the localized costs of density it has no transit to support, a development community that will not build under a development-charge schedule that breaks its financial model, a neighbouring council that reads a severance rule as discriminatory, a city that will not fund a budget increase it considers unaffordable. None of these yields to a better plan. They yield to a decision the relevant owners make together and then hold. A municipality that has moved its strategy to the edge of execution has, in effect, inherited a coordination problem — and coordination problems are solved by a different instrument than the one that produced the plan.
The venture is what makes the question urgent. When the County conditioned its agenda on real-world milestones — affordable units actually built, urban boundaries actually serviced, rent supports actually sustained — it took ownership of coordination risk it might once have left downstream. It now occupies the position of the actor who must make a system work without holding the levers any single actor would need to make it work alone. That is precisely the condition in which a decision-forcing process earns its place: the analysis is done, the strategy is set, and what is missing is a binding agreement among people who do not report to one another.
Read across the County’s first half of 2026 and a pattern emerges. The same structural conditions recur: multiple owners of the constraints, none able to mandate the others; broad agreement in principle that never hardens into binding commitment; dependence on an external “village” that must move in concert; a real deadline; and a funded strategy that has not yet converted into coordinated action. Eight current challenges carry that signature. Each is named below with the structural trap it sits in and the recent, citable trigger that makes it live now.
The County is concluding consultations for the 2025–2035 “A Place to Call Home” update, with engagement and validation sessions through early 2026.1 Ambitious ten-year plans routinely devolve into strategy documents because the actors who control land, hyper-local zoning, and infrastructure financing never commit to binding implementation. The data exists; the binding delivery schedule does not.
In May 2026 the Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee split 4:4 on a $2.9-million budget increase, with the City of Guelph’s four representatives voting against.5 To meet the demand for reductions, the County warned of a $650,000 cut to the Housing Stability Rent Support program, which keeps 321 households housed at an average $800 monthly subsidy. The governance structure has produced a zero-sum paralysis at the worst possible moment.
An affordable-townhouse project in Drayton was forced from two rows of eight units into a compromised, lower-density, higher-priced design by Mapleton’s frontage minimums and six-unit row limits — bylaws the township defends by citing a genuine lack of transit and servicing.2 The County’s affordability target and the township’s infrastructure reality are both rational and directly opposed.
Facing a $36-million infrastructure deficit for the Fergus South Secondary Plan, Centre Wellington proposed pushing the development charge on a single detached dwelling from roughly $22,000 to $48,000. The development community warned it would halt construction; Council imposed a six-month freeze expiring October 1, 2026.3 The freeze defers the trade-off rather than resolving it, with OLT appeals already in play.
The April 2026 adoption of OPA 131 exposed deep fractures between member municipalities over rural lot severances — with one township securing a 2025 severance cutoff while a neighbour remained bound to 2005 — generating public claims of discriminatory, inequitable policy and leaving the framework vulnerable to appeal.4 Sequential negotiation produced a policy that pleased almost no one.
After cancelling a centralized $7-million Continuum of Care complex, the County distributed the Community Housing Development Grant across seven townships, seeding non-profit projects from supportive housing to seniors’ expansions.6 Decentralization sparked local wins but distributed execution authority across many independent boards, risking fragmentation that dilutes County-wide impact and affordability compliance.
Identifying and supporting youth experiencing homelessness across Wellington’s vast rural geography requires tight coordination between dispersed social services, school boards, police, and community networks.7 The County holds the research and the mandate; what it lacks is an operational network that synchronizes the on-the-ground behaviours of the actors who must find and house these youth.
The Winter Homelessness Response Plan budget nearly doubled, to roughly $1.43 million, to accommodate at least 75 unsheltered individuals — relying on a temporary site, dispersed hotel rooms, and distributed tents and sleeping bags.8 A reactive, ad-hoc model is hardening into a permanent, escalating liability with no transition to durable capacity.
These eight are not eight different problems. They are one structural condition recurring across housing supply, municipal finance, rural land use, and social services. In each, the County has done the analysis and committed the strategy; in each, the binding constraint is a coordination decision among owners who do not report to one another; and in each, a real clock is running. That recurrence is itself the signal that the work has reached the edge of execution.
When the same coordination questions reappear across unrelated files — who absorbs the cost of density, who carries the liability, who funds the shared service, who commits to build — the recurrence points not to a shortfall in the work but to the natural boundary of the format being used. Consultations, council sessions, and standing committees are the right tools for surfacing issues, building relationships, and aligning on what the problems are. They are not built to force a binding trade-off among constraint owners who each retain a veto. That is a different job, and it requires a different instrument.
A Mind Meeting is that instrument: a structured, decision-grade process that convenes the County’s internal cross-functional team together with the external “village” of stakeholders who control the real-world constraints, and moves them through three stages — Analyze, Diverge, Converge. Participants first align on the facts and surface who actually controls each constraint; then generate options that cross the boundaries the analysis exposed; then converge on a single 30/60/90-day plan with named owners and resolved trade-offs. The output is not a report. It is a set of commitments made by the people who must honour them.
The two challenges that follow are the most Mind Meeting-shaped on the County’s current agenda. Each has the hardest clock, the clearest set of named constraint owners, and the most complete paralysis of the standing process. Each is worked through below to show what a decision-forcing process produces at every stage that the existing format, by design, cannot.
The Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee is the structural linchpin for the region’s shared social programs — social housing, rent supplements, child care, and homelessness response — funded jointly by the County of Wellington and the City of Guelph through a proportional levy.5 In May 2026 the committee split 4:4 on a preliminary ten-year financial plan and the immediate 2026 budget. County staff, citing inflation and a documented surge in the unsheltered population, proposed a $2.9-million increase. The City’s four representatives voted against, insisting the County reduce the impact on city taxpayers. The motion failed. The County then warned that meeting the City’s demand could be achieved only by capping the Housing Stability Rent Support program — a $650,000 cut that would freeze new placements and threaten the housing of households already receiving an average $800 monthly subsidy. At the exact moment the County is finalizing its ten-year homelessness strategy, the funding for its most effective homelessness-prevention tool is collapsing.
The committee room frames this as a single number — a $2.9-million increase, up or down. What Analyze surfaces is that the number is a stack of distinct, separately owned constraints that the committee has been forced to resolve in one undifferentiated vote. The City’s constraint is an absolute ceiling on the levy increase its council can defend to its own taxpayers. The County’s constraint is a statutory service-delivery mandate it cannot lawfully abandon. The rent-support program’s constraint is a caseload of 321 households whose displacement has a quantifiable downstream cost — in shelter beds, winter-response spending, and emergency placements — that the budget line does not capture. Each of these is real. None of them is visible as a separate object in a single up-or-down committee vote.
What Analyze does that the committee cannot is separate problems that appear identical but are not. “Reduce the budget impact” and “protect rent support” are treated, in the committee room, as opposing positions on one axis. They are in fact constraints owned by different parties with different levers, and the apparent conflict between them collapses the moment the downstream cost of a rent-support cut is placed on the table beside the levy increase it is meant to avoid. A household displaced from the private rental market does not leave the system; it re-enters it through a more expensive door. Until that cost is named and owned in the room, the committee is comparing a visible number against an invisible one, and the visible number wins every time.
Analyze also exposes a structural feature the standing process hides: the committee is a tie-breaking machine with no tie-breaker. A 4:4 split is not an anomaly to be voted around; it is the predictable output of an even-numbered body in which each side answers to a different electorate. The real constraint is not the budget. It is the absence of any forum in which the City’s fiscal ceiling and the County’s service floor can be reconciled before they meet as opposing votes. The dimensions below are the ones a decision-forcing process must hold in a single room, because none of them can be resolved alone.
| Dimension | Why it cannot be solved alone |
|---|---|
| Acceptable service-level floor for rent support | The minimum caseload and subsidy the County must sustain is a statutory and humanitarian threshold the City cannot set unilaterally — yet the City funds part of it, so neither party can define the floor without the other in the room. |
| The City’s defensible levy ceiling | Guelph’s representatives answer to a separate electorate and cannot accept an increase their council cannot defend; that ceiling is real and fixed outside the committee, so the County cannot plan around it without the City stating it explicitly. |
| Downstream cost of displacement | Cutting rent support pushes households into shelters and winter response at higher unit cost; that cost lands on both budgets later but appears on neither line now, so it is invisible until both parties quantify it together. |
| Cost-sharing formula and levy allocation | The proportional split that funds the joint agencies is the mechanism generating the conflict; reweighting it is a shared decision that cannot be made by one party without the other treating it as a unilateral transfer. |
| Multi-year funding envelope and reserves | A durable answer requires a multi-year envelope, not a single-year vote; building one means both treasuries committing to a forward path at once, which no annual committee cycle is structured to produce. |
| Governance and tie-break mechanism | A 4:4 body with no escalation path will deadlock again next cycle; redesigning the decision rule is a governance change neither party can impose, so it must be agreed jointly or it recurs indefinitely. |
With the constraints mapped and shared, the second stage generates options that cross the boundaries Analyze exposed — the kind no single party would propose because no single party owns the upside. Teams are deliberately mixed: County housing and finance staff, City finance and council representatives, shelter and outreach operators, and a cost-modelling analyst who can put a number on displacement. Their task is to generate options for the joint problem, not to defend the position each brought into the room.
From that configuration, options emerge that a binary committee vote cannot produce. A tiered rent-support floor that protects existing recipients while phasing new intake against a funded ramp, rather than capping the program outright. A multi-year cost-sharing path that trades a lower first-year increase for a committed envelope, giving the City a defensible number now and the County predictability later. A jointly owned displacement-cost model that converts the invisible downstream cost into a line both treasuries can see, changing what “saving” actually means. A reserve or contingency mechanism that absorbs inflation shocks without forcing an annual standoff. And a governance fix — a tie-break or escalation rule — that ensures the next 4:4 does not reproduce this crisis. None of these is available inside a single up-or-down motion; each becomes available the moment the parties are generating options together rather than voting against one another.
The third stage forces choice. The village — County and City representatives, the staff who run the programs, and the operators who absorb the consequences — converges on a single 30/60/90-day plan with named owners and resolved trade-offs. The trade-off that must be forced here is the one the committee structure suppresses: each side has a rational incentive to hold its position until the other blinks. Converge does not wish that incentive away; it changes what the parties are deciding, from a single number imposed on one electorate to a multi-year structure that gives each side something it can defend. In the first thirty days, the parties adopt a shared displacement-cost model and agree a protected service floor. By sixty days, a multi-year cost-sharing path and reserve mechanism are drafted. By ninety days, a governance fix is adopted so the deadlock does not recur. The deliverable is not a budget memo. It is a funding agreement the people who must honour it built together.
That is a decision only the City and County representatives can make together, and only once, in a setting that binds them. Made well, it converts a recurring 4:4 standoff into a durable, multi-year financial consensus — and removes the immediate threat to 321 households before the cut becomes irreversible. The village that must be in the room is set out below.
| Stakeholder | Role in the problem | Why their absence stalls the solution |
|---|---|---|
| County Director of Housing Services | Owns the rent-support program and the service-delivery mandate | Without the program owner, the protected floor cannot be defined and the downstream consequences of a cut stay theoretical rather than owned. |
| County CAO and finance lead | Hold the County’s budget position and statutory obligations | Absent, no one can commit the County to a multi-year envelope or trade a first-year number for a forward path. |
| City of Guelph council representatives | Hold the levy ceiling and half the funding decision | Without them stating the defensible ceiling explicitly, the County keeps planning around a number the City never confirms, and the deadlock repeats. |
| City of Guelph finance / treasury staff | Translate council’s ceiling into a workable multi-year path | Absent, the cost-sharing options remain political positions rather than modelled, fundable structures both treasuries can sign. |
| Shelter and outreach operators | Absorb the consequences of any rent-support cut | Without them, the displacement cost is an abstraction; in the room, they make the downstream load concrete and credible to both funders. |
| Cost-modelling / data analyst | Quantifies displacement and multi-year scenarios | Absent, the invisible cost stays invisible and the visible levy number wins by default, exactly as it did in the committee vote. |
| Joint-committee chair / governance lead | Owns the decision rule and escalation path | Without them, no tie-break or governance fix can be adopted, and a future 4:4 reproduces the crisis regardless of this year’s settlement. |
To deliver the urban-boundary expansion approved under OPA 126 — which grows Centre Wellington toward a population of 58,200 by 2051 — the municipality must service hundreds of hectares of new land.3 The mechanism for funding the water, wastewater, and transit infrastructure is development charges levied on new construction. Facing a $36-million infrastructure deficit for the Fergus South Secondary Plan alone, Centre Wellington proposed pushing the charge on a single detached dwelling from roughly $22,000 to $48,000. The development community responded that such a shock would halt new construction outright, exposing the fatal flaw in the mechanism: development charges are collected only when development occurs, so a rate high enough to stall building collects nothing and the infrastructure never comes online. Council granted a six-month freeze to October 1, 2026, to allow consultation and a phased approach — a reprieve, not a resolution, with OLT appeals already filed and the clock running.
Framed as a rate, this looks like a single decision on a single number: how high to set the charge. What Analyze surfaces is that the rate is the intersection of several separately owned constraints that the standing process forces into one figure. The municipality owns a real and time-bound infrastructure deficit it is statutorily required to fund. The development community owns a construction-viability threshold below which projects do not proceed, and it controls the decision to build that ultimately funds everything. Existing residents own an equity interest — the principle that growth pays for growth, and that new charges should not cross-subsidize benefits to current taxpayers. The County owns the regional growth target the whole exercise exists to serve. Each constraint is legitimate; the single rate is where they are forced to collide.
What Analyze does that the freeze cannot is reveal that the parties are trapped in a negative feedback loop, not a negotiation. A rate set to fully fund the deficit halts construction, which collects no charges, which leaves the deficit unfunded — so the rate that appears most fiscally responsible is the one most likely to produce zero revenue. The standing process cannot see this because it treats the rate as the decision; the loop only becomes visible when the construction-viability threshold and the revenue requirement are placed in the room as separate objects owned by separate parties. The freeze did not break the loop. It paused it, and set a date on which the same collision recurs.
Analyze also separates an equity question that is hiding inside the rate. “Growth pays for growth” and “fund the deficit” are treated as the same objective, but they diverge precisely where the development community alleges the charge study includes costs that benefit existing residents. That allegation is the live fuel for the OLT appeals, and it cannot be resolved by setting a number; it can only be resolved by disaggregating which costs are genuinely growth-related and which are not — a determination the parties must make together or litigate apart. The dimensions below are the ones a decision-forcing process must hold simultaneously, because none can be resolved alone before the freeze expires.
| Dimension | Why it cannot be solved alone |
|---|---|
| Construction-viability threshold | Only the development community knows the charge level at which projects stop penciling; set without them, the rate either collects nothing or halts the pipeline, and the municipality cannot model it from the outside. |
| Infrastructure cost and revenue requirement | Only the municipality holds the true servicing cost and timing for Fergus South; developers cannot accept a rate whose basis they cannot see, so the deficit must be opened jointly or it is contested line by line. |
| Growth-pays-for-growth equity | The allegation that the charge study includes benefits to existing residents is the fuel for OLT appeals; disaggregating growth costs from base costs is a shared technical judgment, not a number one side can impose. |
| Phasing and exemption schedule | A phased rate with intensification exemptions can protect viability while funding the deficit, but the phase-in only works if developers commit to build against it and the municipality commits to the servicing timeline in parallel. |
| Servicing build-out sequencing | Infrastructure must come online in step with construction; mismatched sequencing strands either serviced land or unfunded pipe, and only the utility planners and developers together can align the two timelines. |
| Binding agreement before the October deadline | The freeze expires October 1, 2026; without a binding cost-sharing and phasing agreement by then, the rate snaps back, appeals proceed, and the pipeline stalls — a deadline no single party can move on its own. |
With the constraints mapped, the second stage generates options that cross the boundaries the rate decision collapses. Teams mix municipal finance and servicing planners, County planning staff, major developers and their consultants, and a financing specialist who can structure cost over time rather than loading it onto a single charge. Their task is to generate options for the shared problem — funding the deficit without halting the pipeline — not to defend the rate each side wants.
From that configuration, options emerge that a single rate cannot express. A phased development-charge schedule that ramps as the pipeline absorbs it, giving the municipality committed future revenue and developers a survivable near-term cost. Targeted exemptions for the high-density intensification the County most wants, aligning the charge with the housing outcome rather than working against it. Front-ending or financing mechanisms — area-specific charges, developer-funded servicing with credits, or staged debt — that decouple when infrastructure is built from when charges are collected, breaking the feedback loop directly. A jointly produced, disaggregated cost basis that separates growth costs from base costs, removing the equity grievance that drives the appeals. And a servicing-sequencing agreement that ties pipe to permits so neither side strands its commitment. None of these is reachable inside a single up-or-down rate; each becomes reachable when the parties build the structure together.
The third stage forces choice before the freeze expires. The village — Centre Wellington council and senior staff, municipal finance and servicing planners, County planning, and the major developers — converges on a single 30/60/90-day plan with named owners and resolved trade-offs. The trade-off that must be forced is the one the freeze defers: the municipality wants its deficit funded and the developers want a viable cost, and each has held its position waiting for the other to move. Converge changes what is being decided, from a single rate imposed on the pipeline to a phased structure with a shared cost basis that gives both a number they can defend. In the first thirty days, the parties agree a disaggregated, jointly verified cost basis. By sixty days, a phased schedule with intensification exemptions and a financing mechanism is drafted. By ninety days — inside the October window — a binding cost-sharing and servicing-sequencing agreement is signed. The deliverable is not another DC study. It is an agreement the parties who must build and fund the growth made together.
That is a decision only the municipality and the development community can make together, and only once, in a setting that binds them before the rate snaps back. Made well, it converts a six-month pause into a durable, appeal-resistant funding structure — and turns the urban-boundary expansion from lines on a map into serviced, buildable land. The village that must be in the room is set out below.
| Stakeholder | Role in the problem | Why their absence stalls the solution |
|---|---|---|
| Centre Wellington council and senior staff | Own the development-charge decision and the freeze deadline | Without the decision-makers in the room, any agreement is advisory and the rate still snaps back in October regardless of what others propose. |
| Municipal finance / treasury officers | Hold the true infrastructure cost and revenue requirement | Absent, the cost basis stays opaque and developers contest every line, so no phased structure can be grounded in a shared number. |
| Servicing and utility planners | Own the build-out timing for water, wastewater, and transit | Without them, the phasing and sequencing options are guesses, and pipe and permits cannot be aligned to break the feedback loop. |
| Major local developers and builders’ association | Control the decision to build that funds everything | Absent, the construction-viability threshold is unknown and the rate is set blind — the exact failure that produced the freeze. |
| Developers’ planning and financing consultants | Structure cost over time and assess project viability | Without them, financing and front-ending options remain abstract and the parties default back to arguing a single rate. |
| County planning department | Owns the regional growth target the exercise serves | Absent, local rate-setting drifts from the 2051 targets and intensification exemptions are not tied to the housing outcomes the County needs. |
| Provincial / financing-authority representative | Enables area-specific charges, credits, or staged debt | Without them, the financing mechanisms that decouple build timing from collection may be unavailable, narrowing the options to the rate itself. |
None of this displaces what the County already does well. The consultations, the council sessions, the standing committees, and the official-plan processes remain the right tools for surfacing issues, building relationships, and aligning on what the problems are and why they matter. The decision-forcing process described here is a complement, brought in at the point where coordination — not analysis — has become the binding constraint. It is the instrument for the second job, used when the first job is done and the work has reached the edge of execution.
There is a simple self-test for when that point has arrived. Look across successive council cycles and consultations: if the same coordination questions keep reappearing on the agenda — who absorbs the cost of density, who funds the shared service, who carries the liability, who commits to build — that recurrence is the signal. It points not to any shortfall in the work, but to the natural boundary of the format being used. If those questions are instead being resolved and ticked off, replaced by new ones that reflect genuine forward progress, no new tool is required and the existing process is doing its job.
Applied to the present agenda, the test is not hard to run. The Mapleton density standoff, the development-charge feedback loop, the joint-services deadlock, the rural-severance grievance, the fragmentation risk in decentralized capital — these are not puzzles that more analysis will dissolve. They are the coordination questions a municipality encounters whenever it pushes strategy to the edge of delivery. Their recurrence across housing supply, municipal finance, and social services is itself the evidence that the binding constraint has shifted from knowing to deciding.
One feature of the County’s current position makes this transition unusually tractable. In each of the eight challenges, the constraint owners are known by role and seat. The director who owns the rent-support program, the council that holds the levy ceiling, the planners who hold the servicing cost, the developers who control the build decision, the neighbouring councils that hold the severance rules — none of these is an abstraction. The clarity of the constraint map is itself a product of the County’s rigorous planning, and it means the village a decision-forcing process must convene is already visible. What remains is to get that village into a room structured to force the trade-offs the open questions represent.
The County of Wellington has already supplied the two things that are hardest to supply: the strategy and the capital. Its most urgent files are no longer waiting on a better plan. They are waiting on a decision — on whether the City and the County will fund a shared service before 321 households lose their rent support, on whether the municipality and the development community will agree a phased charge before the freeze expires in October, on whether seven townships and their non-profit partners will move as one portfolio, and on whether neighbouring councils will hold a rural-growth framework that survives appeal.
Those decisions can be made. The constraint owners are known. The strategy is set. The clocks are running but they have not closed. The open question is whether the people who must make the decisions will be brought into one room — a room structured to force the trade-offs — before the window does.
Mark McCarvill is the founder of Mind Meeting Group, a Vancouver-based strategy and facilitation firm. He has led more than 100 strategic workshops across pharmaceutical, government, and not-for-profit sectors, working with seven of the global top-twelve pharmaceutical companies and facilitating the alignment of more than 3,000 leaders and stakeholders. Mind Meeting Group specializes in complex, multi-stakeholder challenges where the answer is knowable but not yet executable — and where the right process, not more analysis, is what converts strategy into committed action.