How to enable an effective strategy away-day that delivers on a strategic and human level

If you're joining us here (ie part 2) – welcome. You're about to discover how to enable a productive strategy design session – whether you are in your office, or off site for a week in the mountains (I wish). These tips apply whether you're hosting a session for your own team, or supporting another team. If you want tips specifically on running a hybrid strategy session, check out our blog post tips for facilitating a hybrid team offsite.

If you have landed here by chance, you might want to check out part one in this three part series: Clarity of intent and planning for outcomes.

A reminder of the context

With belt-tightening the dominating imperative right now, it can be hard to secure the time and investment to step out of the office to focus on strategy. We do a lot of work designing, facilitating and generally looking after creative, energising and collaborative strategy and learning experiences. In this three-part blog series, we look at how to ensure collaborative time together is productive and impactful on a strategy and human level, and that big (and small) ideas translate into action.

Part two: Enabling a human and productive collaborative process

Get a facilitator

At the risk of plugging our wares, there really is a huge benefit to engaging the services of an experienced facilitator when it comes to ensuring your working session delivers on a human and strategy level. Don't just take it from me, here's what one HRD client in the tech sector says facilitation brought to her team’s strategy sessions:

Creating a line of sight and keeping us focused on the bigger picture
Helping us find and draw on our collective mojo
Galvanising us around a longer term vision and purpose – re-energising and uniting us as we found powerful common ground in ‘why’ we do what we do
Pragmatic tools and content to enable us to create the strategy, but also impact the day to day, immediately after the workshop

When it comes to choosing a facilitator, find someone who can tune into what matters to the leader and the team itself and help create clarity on what tangible outcomes are needed. On the day, a good facilitator will create the space for the right conversation to happen at the right time; they will listen powerfully to what is and isn’t being said; and they will move the group forward when it gets stuck.

Remember the journey

Every workshop-style experience has a flow as people come together, connect, collaborate and move on. We use the 5Es of experience design to think through the different stages and what might be needed: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend. Being mindful of where you are in that journey is helpful for enabling a conducive environment, as different stages require different interventions and support (see blog post 1 and 3 in this series for more on entice and extend).

Some practical examples of using this flow include having a check-in at the beginning to allow people to mentally and emotionally enter the space. Similarly, we like to move towards the exit with a debrief on the process (not the content) – what worked, what didn't, what are we still curious about? And a period of appreciation – what and who should we acknowledge for what we've achieved today?

Mix it up

Co-creating a vision or strategy is a mix of left and right brain activity. But too often, the strategy development process gets stuck in the analytical, verbal part of the brain that seeks order (the left brain). This is a limitation, because strategic work needs to happen at the creative side of the brain also. In the language of positive intelligence (something I'm currently exploring as part of my coaching practice), we need to get people into thrive mode (versus survive mode), where they can realise and tap into their curiosity, creativity and happiness. To do this, design your strategy session with a range of activities to create positivity, energy and a sense of calm. Some techniques we use include:

Visualisation to project into the future and paint a picture of what the business or team needs to achieve
Picture card sorts to help people express this vision, their ideas or feelings
Physical and paper constellations to explore how different people feel about the options or other factors under discussion
Moodboards, cutting out pictures from magazines etc, to tell a story about the transformation journey ahead

There really are multiple things you can do, depending on the task and the team. The key is to embrace it and encourage the team to do the same. Just because strategy sessions have usually involved working through spreadsheets and PPT decks, doesn't mean they need to.

Connection over content

In any strategy session, there is likely to be a tension between getting to the answers, and nurturing the social capital in the team or group that will ensure the brilliant strategy translates into action. This is why it's so important to work at the human level, as well as the strategy level. Depending on the team or group, that might be as simple as ensuring an enabling space where people feel safe to have the conversations that are needed in the right way and at the right pace. There's lots you can do to achieve that, from building in flexible breaks, to mixing up the team into individual, pair, small and whole group activities.

However, if the team behind the strategy is not working well together, the chances of the strategy having a meaningful life are massively reduced. At this point, a seasoned facilitator may suggest bringing in a team coach to help the team work better together, with others and within the wider environment to create lasting change by developing safe and trusting relationships and better ways of working.

Capture

Particularly when you're creating artefacts in the room (eg moodboards, journey maps, vision statements etc), it's important to take pictures as a reminder of your discussions. It may be helpful (depending on the context) to add individual or group names to these.

The 101

Define your next steps! Not just what, but who, when and how. And how will you hold yourselves accountable. The very next step could be as simple as agreeing what platform you will use to answer any questions in the carpark and share artefacts. Make sure you have a date for the next item, and make it soon to maintain momentum.

End on a high

Remember, the exit matters (see point above about appreciation). Make sure, however tired or stretched you are, there is a moment to reflect and appreciate the work you've done and acknowledge each others' contributions.