Strategy away-days in the year of efficiency
Strategy away-days still make sense if you focus on tangible outcomes (and are rigorous about what comes next)
With organisations tightening their belts and seeking to do more with less, 2023 has been dubbed 'the year of efficiency'. Against such a backdrop, time out of the office to reimagine the future, create new and deeper connection, strategise and plan can become off limits. However, teams still need to make time to come together to reconnect, reimagine, re-energise and reset strategy. It's more critical than ever that the business case for spending time in this way is well made. And, from an evaluation perspective, that this effort and energy are productive and meaningful on a human and strategy level.
So how do you make the case for a strategy away-day (or a few days) and ensure tangible outcomes?
Plan, enable and activate
When budgets are tight and cost-cutting is the name of the game, it’s vital to build the case and ensure effective collaborative time together. And that big (and small) ideas effectively translate into action. How to do it is what we’ve set out to explore. The pointers we share apply equally, whether you, or the team you are supporting are working face to face, hybrid or virtually. That said, hybrid is unique – see our tips for facilitating a hybrid team offsite.
We do a lot of work designing, facilitating and generally looking after creative, energising and collaborative strategy and learning experiences. Recent examples include:
A hybrid strategy retreat for the global people team of a NGO
A purpose and values discovery process for the leadership team of a founder-led UK-based property business
A customer value proposition development process for a network of global community-building experts
A people strategy development workshop in tandem with an extensive face-to-face listening exercise
Defining a partner engagement strategy for a global NGO
In this blog series (yes, it’s so good we’ve created three separate posts) we aren’t specifically looking at the tools and techniques behind such experiences. If that's what you are after, come back soon when we'll have a post on how we use the 5Es of experience design. Rather, this series is looking at strategy days through the lens of 'efficiency' – doing more with less and ensuring you deliver what’s needed. The series will have something for you if you are planning your own team’s strategy day, or if you have been asked to support another team’s.
As there is a lot to cover, we've broken our thoughts into three areas.
We will share these posts one at a time and we would love to hear your experience, insights and questions in response. When the series is complete, we will create a download paper with our combined thoughts on practical steps you can take at each point..
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Go straight to part one now: clarity of intent and planning for outcomes.
And please add your thoughts or comments in the box below so we can incorporate your insight into the intent, enable and activate paper.
