Issue analysis is the art of formulating the questions that strategic planners need to ask and answer in order to achieve their objectives. Issue analysis therefore underpins success in most enterprises. Luck may be better, but you cannot rely on luck!

Issue analysis is the process of ‘determinating’* and formulating as practical questions the matters that need to be dealt with in order to progress from ‘where we are’ to ‘where we want to be’.

Issue analysis is a rare skill, and not easy to learn or to practise. Issue analysis warrants vastly more attention as a subject of study – and an essential skill – than it receives.

Anyone who is serious about strategy needs to tap into issue analysis. For you cannot get the right strategic answers unless you ask the right strategic questions.

Capacity in issue analysis is acquired by philosophical reflection on experience. Issue analysis is informed by understandings of individual and institutional drivers and behaviour.

Stride Advisory is committed to advancing understanding of the philosophy, the theory and the practice of issue analysis. The Principal of Stride Advisory has experience in teaching issue analysis.

*The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word ‘determinate’ is obsolete as a verb: however, the particular features of issue analysis demand that the obsolete verb ‘to determinate’ should be restored to life.