Aligning executive leadership behind a shared vision for Sydney's future

Working with executive and senior leaders across the City of Sydney, this partnership aligned leadership around a shared vision, creating the strategic foundation for one of Australia's most ambitious city transformation agendas.

• Executive and senior leaders aligned around a shared long-term vision for the organisation.
• More than 60 leaders collaborated to develop integrated organisational and departmental strategic plans.
• The process shaped the City's 10 Targets for 2030, providing a clear strategic roadmap to guide future priorities.
• The strategic planning process was embedded as an annual leadership practice, strengthening alignment across the organisation.

The City of Sydney set out to define an ambitious long-term vision for the city's future: one that would become known as Sydney: Green, Global and Connected. Achieving this required more than a strategic planning exercise. It demanded alignment across the organisation's executive and senior leadership community, bringing together diverse perspectives to establish a shared direction for the city and the organisation responsible for delivering it.

Developing a vision of this scale required leaders to work across departmental boundaries, balance competing priorities and build genuine ownership of the strategy. Success depended not only on defining the vision, but on creating the leadership alignment needed to turn it into action.

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LIW partnered with the City of Sydney to design and facilitate a collaborative strategic planning process that engaged the organisation's executive and senior leaders over a three-month period.

Working closely with internal and external stakeholders, LIW created structured conversations that enabled leaders to explore priorities, challenge assumptions, and build alignment around a shared future direction. Rather than treating strategy as a document to be written, the process positioned strategy as something leaders collectively shaped and committed to delivering.

Following the initial engagement, LIW continued to facilitate the organisation's annual strategic planning process, supporting more than 60 leaders to translate the long-termvision into integrated organisational and departmental plans.

The work established a shared strategic direction that continued to guide the City of Sydney's priorities for years to come. The resulting 10 Targets for 2030 provided a clear framework for decision making investment and organisational focus.

Equally important, the process strengthened collaboration across the executive team and embedded an annual planning rhythm that aligned leaders around shared priorities. Rather than a one-off strategy exercise, the partnership helped build the leadership alignment needed to sustain the City's long-term vision.