What a rudder is to a ship, strategic planning is to an organization. However, most organizations leave it on the back burner when shaping organizational priorities. Strategic planning becomes nothing more than an annual checklist, accompanied by a lack of clarity over its implementation and enforcement. Without direction and a concrete action plan, a vision will be left unrealized.

This is where Holliday | Kenning comes in, assisting companies in launching their organizational strategies into action, transforming their on-paper goals into actionable ones. They empower clients with tried and tested methods for designing impactful, actionable strategic goals. Established by accomplished and experienced HR consultants Dr. Trish Holliday and Lucinda Kenning, Holliday | Kenning stands apart in building customized solutions for developing robust strategic planning processes for organizations. This creates a culture of organizational alignment, driving employee performance across all segments.



“We offer a practitioner’s understanding to other practitioners, bringing practicality to the strategic planning process that enables clients to move beyond just the plan,” says Dr. Holliday, Founding Partner at Holliday | Kenning. An evidence-based, results-oriented emphasis on approaching strategic planning from a practitioner’s perspective is Holliday | Kenning’s most significant differentiator in the consulting world. This approach is summed up by the company’s tagline “By Practitioners, For Practitioners.”

Its process is based on best HR practices and a firmly held belief in the role of a cultural shift in fostering organizational success. It involves aligning organizational goals, vision, mission, values, products, services, and workforces with the culture by creating organizational strategies with action plans, with an eye toward future organizational needs.

Delivering Real-World Expertise

Holliday | Kenning’s founding partners are on a mission to “spread the HR gospel” with a focus on people development, driven by a passion to uplift companies by leveraging real-world industry experiences. Dr. Holliday’s doctorate in Education with an emphasis on learning organizations and strategic change and Kenning’s MBA degree—along with their experiences in high-ranking state government positions—help them bring wide-ranging real-world knowledge, practicality, and expertise to transforming organizational culture. Staying up-to-date with the latest industry know-how in strategic planning, leadership development, performance, and organizational change management contributes to their ability to deliver highly effective solutions to clients.

Having played instrumental roles in creating organizational strategic planning and leadership development programs, they leverage their extensive working knowledge to set a proper direction for organizations’ goals. It is this real-world experience in handling changing circumstances with in-depth strategic planning to fulfill predefined company goals that Holliday | Kenning brings to clients.

“Our strategic planning process is inclusive, engaging, and collaborative. It is grounded in things that we know work, drives accountability, and is integrated into how the company moves forward,” says Lucinda Kenning, Founding Partner at Holliday | Kenning.

Expert Strategic Planning in Action

With meticulous planning and a deep understanding of client needs, Dr. Holliday and Kenning build winning organizational cultures via a methodical, strategic planning process. The founding partners spend significant time in the planning phase to understand the client’s definition of organizational success and its future direction. This enables Holliday | Kenning to deliver effective results to clients during the execution phase, that are in line with their predefined organizational goals and objectives.
Holliday | Kenning also ensures workforces become a part of the strategic planning process by aligning employee performance with company goals, checking on their progress annually, and building future goals based on their performance.

The foundation of Holliday | Kenning’s strategic planning process is its “learn it, practice it, launch it” LPL model, which follows an innovative method of designing, testing, and implementing strategic goals. The learning phase involves gaining an in-depth view and understanding of the organizational needs and determining the required course of action to meet them. Next, the practice phase comprises testing the action plans by defining the roles of people in the plans and outlining a timeline for plan assessments. With every organizational aspect thoroughly tested, the plan is launched, and success imminent.

A Playbook for Driving Organizational Success

The LPL model is delivered through Playbook, Holliday | Kenning’s framework for developing customized solutions for organizational culture shifts. The framework is industry-agnostic, with wide applications across the public and private sectors.

Organizational performance is driven through the Five Plays in Playbook. Play One is strategic planning. Play Two is succession readiness. It creates a culture that can sustain the talent pipeline by ensuring quality development of employees in mission-critical roles. For this, Holliday | Kenning has tools and templates to help organizations identify, train, and invest in high-potential talent in their workforces, while enabling employees to gain transferable skills.

Helping build a culture of talent sustainability is Play Three, with leadership development programs for high-potential employees. This helps prepare future-ready organizational leaders who can be competitive in advanced roles.

To streamline the promotion process for top talent, Play Four offers organizational accountability that ensures the right talent gets appropriately recognized and rewarded, fostering better talent retention. It is achieved through Holliday | Kenning’s Three C formula—clear goals, continuous benchmarking, and courageous feedback. Currently, Holliday | Kenning is employing Play Four to redesign and build a coordinated performance appraisal program for an organization seeking to provide its employees with a unified, customized appraisal experience. Change navigation forms Play Five. It involves weekly assessments of the organizational culture and identifying ways to make required cultural changes to build a winning work environment.

The Five Plays are often interwoven to deliver solutions that drive organizational performance and success. For instance, Holliday | Kenning blended strategic planning with leadership development for a client seeking to develop their leaders. While building custom leadership development programs for the client’s top talent, Holliday | Kenning probed into the mission, vision, and values they wanted to be incorporated into the program. This led the client’s leadership team to notice gaps in their core organizational priorities, making them pivot their focus to strategic planning. Holliday | Kenning redefined their strategic priorities and leveraged them to build a potent leadership development program. Currently, an organizational change management program is being developed for the client that is fully grounded in their newfound strategic vision.

Holliday | Kenning looks forward to scripting great success stories for clients with its initiatives on transforming organizational cultures, making them more conducive to talent acquisition and retention.

Prepared for the Work Culture of Future

Keeping the long-term workplace changes in mind, Holliday | Kenning is also well-positioned to serve the shifting needs of organizations in the wake of the post-pandemic world, which the founding partners label as “the Great Re-imagination.” Be it the need for new organizational strategies for a scattered workforce, transparency in the processes for providing enhanced employee experiences, or greater organizational accountability in the promotion process, Holliday | Kenning is prepared to bring the right solutions to drive a cultural shift that accommodates all these changes in the work environment.

Holliday | Kenning is keen to assist organizations in accommodating new trends such as hybrid work and a four-day work week. The company is also attuned to providing solutions to navigate the non-linear career pathways increasingly gaining prevalence across organizations.

Amid this shifting backdrop, Holliday | Kenning will remain the constant partner to organizations in their journey to realize their company vision, meet their strategic goals, and drive organizational success—propelled by a distinct practitioners’ approach.