Rapid iteration with disciplined gates.
The Strategic Forge (LPKC-R) is what happens when a disciplined, strategy-driven organisation also develops a taste for rapid iteration. Like the LPKC-B variant, it wants to shape its future deliberately in a focused domain, using clear commitments and measurable progress. The code LPKC-R tells us that it still works with a relatively narrow set of interfaces, still believes in new possibilities, still trusts metrics and explicit agreements, and still likes closure and completion. The difference is that its reactions are much more immediate: it is willing to adjust plans, gates and priorities at short notice when new information lands.
From the inside, this feels like a forge that runs hot. Big moves are still decided in a structured way, but the organisation does not wait months to incorporate new learning. When reality pushes back, people expect plans to be revisited, not defended out of habit. The mood is “we are serious about where we are going, and we will keep reshaping our path as we go” rather than “we set the plan, now we must stick to it no matter what”.
Imagine a company that has committed to a few major programmes: a new platform, a new service model, a new way of working with partners. Those programmes are real; they have names, budgets, owners and target dates. At the same time, the teams inside them are running frequent check-ins and short feedback cycles. Every few weeks, delivery teams bring data and stories back to programme leads: customer reactions, technical surprises, regulatory clarifications, operational bottlenecks.
In a review meeting you might see a roadmap up on the wall, but you also see sticky notes and edits. Someone explains that a certain dependency is much harder than expected; another shows that a feature nobody was excited about has turned out to be surprisingly powerful for clients. Instead of treating the original plan as sacred, the group is prepared to move pieces around: pulling some work forward, pushing other items back, cutting low-value tasks to make space for new ones. The overall direction stays the same, but the route keeps being refined.
For people who like clarity, this can be both exciting and tiring. They appreciate that the organisation does not force them to follow a broken plan for a full year, but they also feel the cost of frequent re-planning. For people who value responsiveness, this is a good place to be: their insights and observations matter, and they can see decisions shift relatively quickly. The organisation takes commitment seriously, but it also treats its commitments as living things rather than stone tablets.
An LPKC-R Strategic Forge holds two impulses together: the desire to commit and the willingness to rework. It invests in programmes, architectures and capabilities, but it also builds in regular moments where those investments can be re-examined. New information is not an embarrassment to the plan; it is a normal and expected part of the forging process.
This shows up as a sequence of “mini-forges” inside the larger one. A programme might have an overall two-year horizon, but inside it there are rapid cycles where designs are updated, priorities are shuffled, and some sub-projects are stopped or replaced. Leaders are alert to signals from the edges: what sales is hearing, what support is seeing, what engineers are discovering. They try to distinguish noise from signal, but when something clearly matters, they are willing to move quickly.
Strategic Forges of the LPKC-R kind can be very effective in environments where the organisation has chosen a direction, but the terrain is still rough and changing. They are good at making sure that big, long-lived investments do not drift too far away from reality. They give serious stakeholders the sense that there is a plan and that the plan is not rigid. They can often correct course faster than more buffered LPKC-B organisations, while still avoiding the sense of chaos that comes with fully option-led behaviour.
The price of this pattern is that people can feel like they are constantly “re-forging” the same metal. Because the organisation is open to revisiting decisions, some teams experience a churn of priorities: a piece of work is important one month, then quietly downgraded the next as new information arrives. If communication is not clear, this can feel arbitrary and erode trust.
There is also a risk that metrics and gates become performative: updated frequently but not deeply believed. If every checkpoint leads to a change of plan, people may stop investing in execution and start optimising for influencing the next review instead. The boundary between healthy responsiveness and unhelpful churn is thin.
When this stamp shows up strongly in leadership, one common pattern is that more stability-seeking parts of the organisation (such as operations, compliance, or long-term partners) feel dragged along by a tempo they did not sign up for. They can experience the same strategic flexibility that others value as “never committing properly” or “changing direction as soon as things get uncomfortable”.
If your result points towards Strategic Forge (LPKC-R), it is worth exploring questions like:
Seeing yourself as a Strategic Forge of the more reactive kind can help you decide where to lean into that energy and where to slow down, so that “forging” does not turn into endless reshaping without progress.