Albrecht Enders

Why organisations work with Albrecht Enders

• His Solvable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – gives leadership teams a replicable method for complex decisions, not a diagnostic template. It addresses the two failure modes his research identifies most consistently: solving the wrong problem, and deciding without adequate stakeholder input.
• His academic work on discontinuous change, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal, explains why established firms with strong strategies still get disrupted – and what the firms that adapt successfully did differently. This gives his executive work a research foundation most strategy practitioners cannot draw on.
• His specific argument – that stakeholder engagement must be embedded throughout a decision process, not appended at the end – is a named, testable position that directly challenges how most senior teams structure their strategy work.
• He brings both sides of the strategy question: his IMD research and teaching work on how organisations should decide, and his consulting work with organisations including Siemens, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, Novartis, and Thyssen Krupp on what that looks like under real operating conditions.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD; former Dean of Programs and Innovation
• Co-author of Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier; proposes the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology for complex problem-solving
• Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Research Policy
• Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times
• EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award (2014); Academy of Management BPS Division Glueck Best Paper Award (2011 and 2013)
• Co-director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving and Transition to Business Leadership programs
• Former consultant, Boston Consulting Group (Cologne); board member, Agathon AG

Biography

The decisions that define an organisation’s direction are rarely the ones with clean answers. They involve competing stakeholder priorities, incomplete information, and environments that may not resemble anything the leadership team has navigated before. Albrecht Enders, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IMD, has spent two decades studying why these decisions go wrong – and building the tools to improve them.

His core argument is structural. Most leadership teams separate the act of deciding from the act of engaging the people who will be affected. They analyse, choose, then communicate. Enders’ research shows this sequence is both intellectually and politically costly: involving key stakeholders throughout a decision process produces better choices and creates the sense of fair process that drives implementation. His book Solvable (Pearson, 2022), co-authored with Arnaud Chevallier, translates this into a three-step method – Frame, Explore, Decide – designed to stop executive teams from jumping to solutions before they have properly defined the problem.

His academic research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and Research Policy, focuses on the specific question of how established firms respond to technological discontinuities. This work explains not just that incumbents struggle with disruptive change, but why the structural and behavioural conditions inside large organisations make poor responses predictable – and what distinguishes the firms that adapt. It gives his practitioner work an empirical foundation that strategy consulting alone does not provide.

At IMD, Enders co-directs the Complex Problem Solving program and the Transition to Business Leadership program, and served as Dean of Programs and Innovation until 2020. Before joining IMD, he spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, working on strategy development and reorganisation across financial services, energy, and industrial goods. He sits on the board of Swiss precision toolmaker Agathon and is a founding member of the E4S (Enterprise for Society) executive committee, the sustainability initiative launched jointly by IMD, the University of Lausanne, HEC Lausanne, and EPFL.

Key speaking topics

• Strategic decision-making processes
• Managing discontinuous and technological change
• Complex problem-solving frameworks
• Top-team strategy development
• Incumbent response to disruption
• Corporate strategy in uncertain environments
• Stakeholder engagement in strategic decisions

Ideal for

• C-suite and executive leadership teams reviewing or rebuilding their strategy processes
• Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy functions navigating market discontinuities
• Senior leaders in established industries facing disruption from new technologies or entrants
• Executive education and leadership development programmes at board and senior management level

Audience outcomes

• A structured understanding of where strategic decision-making processes typically break down – and the specific interventions that address each failure point
• Familiarity with the Frame, Explore, Decide methodology from Solvable and how to apply it to live organisational problems
• Insight into the research evidence on why incumbents underperform in discontinuous environments, and which organisational conditions predict better responses
• A reframed view of stakeholder engagement – not as communication management, but as an integral part of building a better decision
• Practical tools for structuring strategy conversations with senior teams that produce both better choices and greater commitment to implementation