So, the biggest required mindset change is yours. Don’t be so pessimistic! As a corporate strategist, this is a wonderful opportunity for you to add enormous value to your company. Treat it as such.
So, start by asking them what their biggest problems are, the ones that keep them awake at night. Create a Pareto chart of them and start working to solve them, beginning with the top problem. But don’t insist on calling what you are doing ‘strategy.’ Why use a term that alienates them? It doesn’t help whatsoever in this situation. Instead just work on solving the problem. Start by reverse-engineering the current set of choices to help executive management gain an appreciation that the current problem is the product of the current set of choices interacting with the competitive environment. That will help them appreciate that they need to make a different set of choices to make the problematic outcome go away.
Choosing strategy is about competing logics not about competing data. We have no data about the future, so the data can never demonstrate that we should do one thing rather than another thing going forward — though data driven (self-proclaimed) strategists consistently make this error. Rather, creating the future is about imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling logical argument can be made, as Aristotle argued 2500 years ago. And that is the essence of strategy.