The SOAR Effect (How Shared Strategy Transforms Results at Every Level)

A practical guide to SOAR, the strengths-based strategy framework that helps leaders at every level create strategy that people can understand, own, and use.

This framework has been used for over twenty years in business, government, education, healthcare, and community settings.

Strategy often breaks down because the people expected to deliver it were never meaningfully involved in shaping it. The SOAR Effect offers a practical, field-tested way to make strategy more inclusive, adaptive, and useful in daily work.

Developed by Jackie Stavros and grounded in more than two decades of research and global practice, SOAR helps readers build strategy through strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results. The framework gives readers a shared language for strategic conversations that lead to action.

Readers will learn how to

• identify the strategic strengths already present in a team or organization,
• use generative questions to surface better opportunities,
• turn aspirations into clear direction people care about,
• define meaningful results and connect them to action, and
• design SOAR conversations, retreats, and planning sessions that can be used right away.

With case studies, questions, sample designs, and companion resources, this book gives readers a repeatable approach for creating a strategy that lives in the organization long after the planning session ends.