The St. Gallen Symposium brought together young and senior leaders to engage in an intergenerational exchange and discuss the topic of “Shifting Global Power”. We shifted perspectives as well by taking participants out of the comfort of the conference rooms right into the real world.

Our session "Learning for Planet" centred on a question we’ve been sitting with for some time: In a world where most answers are just a prompt away, what is left to learn — and how do organisations do it?

The short answer is: By walking the walk and directly engaging with your context.

Walking together shifts the way conversations unfold. Side by side rather than across a table, participants began exploring their context — not just looking straight ahead, but left and right, up and down.

As if on cue, the weather in St. Gallen turned (for the worse). Rain started pouring in the very moment we stepped outside to start our walk. However, equipped with orange umbrellas, a set of reflective questions, and us as motivated guides, participants left the university grounds to immerse themselves in the surrounding hinterland.

Being on the move and the change in environment breaks habitual patterns. What feels stuck in a meeting room can suddenly surface once outdoors. Walking creates the much-needed space for relating to other people but also with the spaces and contexts you move through.

Strategy doesn't happen on paper. It comes to life by engaging with your context.

Organisations don't create value in isolation – they do so through interacting with their environment. At the core of the St. Gallen Management Model is the idea that value is primarily created through an organisation’s relationships with its context.

And yet, many organisations struggle to engage their contextsnavigate this complexity. Instead of embracing strategies that link to their environment, they hold on to the illusion of fixed strategies giving them control, but that fail to reach out to others. embracing adaptive strategy work, they hold on to fixed plans that don't fit their evolving context anymore. As their relations weaken – so does value creation.

Walking is an effective methodology to counter this drift. It creates space for leaders to reconnect –with each other, their teams and the context they operate in. Strategy work becomes a platform for continuous learning instead of a fixed roadmap. Moving together – one step at a time – is where clarity begins.

This is what we practice at For Planet Strategy Lab. When organisations face defining moments, business as usual often isn’t enough. Instead, they need carefully designed settings that pull people out of their daily habits and connect them to new, meaningful contexts.

This is where strategies start to make a difference.

Thank you to Tim Kramer and SQUARE for co-hosting, to Felix Rüdiger and the team at the St. Gallen Symposium for inviting us, and to all participants who walked with us despite the rain.