Strategy day coming up? Do these five easy things to make it go with a bang!
Last week I ran a strategy day for board members and the senior management team of an organisation. A lot was discussed and achieved over the two three-hour sessions. A simple - yet different from usual - approach and format ensured the objectives were achieved. Here are my five tips for getting the best out of any strategy day:
Switch it up. A co-working space. A private room above a pub. A funky meeting room somewhere new. Get. Out. Of. Your. Office. If you want people to feel unencumbered and free from the usual routine to get the thoughts flowing; if you want to achieve breakthroughs and get the energy fired up and flowing - it’s imperative to go somewhere different.
Ditch the table. At this week’s strategy day, there were 18 people in the room. 18 people who would usually sit around a long board table. But tables get in the way. They can act as a barrier. People hide behind them. Hierarchies play out. That’s why I always stipulate an arc or horseshoe of seats. No one is head of the table, everyone can contribute and the layout lends itself to more open conversations.
Keep the topic list concise. Nothing is going to be more off-putting than a long laundry list of topics to discuss. Who wants to wade through ten or twenty points? There won’t be time either to do it all justice. So keep it short. In a six-hour session we tackled four topics. The subjects had space to breathe.
Stay focused. What do you want the outcome to be? Make sure you’re crystal clear on this, whether it’s an agreement in principle, a consensus, a decision. You’ve got all the decision-makers in the room together, so make the most of it to get out of it what you want. You might be surprised by what you can achieve when you bring the constraint of time to the (non-existent) table.
Get an outsider to host. In Luke Johnson’s Sunday Times column on strategy days last weekend (“It’s hard to see any profit amid the undrinkable coffee and whiteboards”) he said that hiring an outsider was pointless: “The facilitator will probably neither understand the industry under discussion nor know the people in the room,” he writes. I wholeheartedly disagree. Getting the right person will bring a fresh perspective, energy and clarity. If they’ve got the nous and leadership credentials, ignorance of the organisation or industry won’t matter a bit. In fact, when you’ve got someone who isn’t familiar with the day-to-day they can ask the questions perhaps no one else will. They’ll be able to challenge and their impartiality and lack of vested interests can get everyone to contribute without any political undertones.
