A strategy workshop is a powerful and inexpensive tool to quickly bring a management team into alignment about key issues, business objectives, new opportunities, and a plan of attack. While each workshop is customized to the clients need, the general approach is to 1) Get both beliefs and facts in front of the entire group in a relevant and efficient way, 2) take individuals out of their comfort zone and create structured cross-dialog efforts throughout the entire process and, 3) ensure that there is enough “space” for creative, break-through ideas.
The specific off-site design almost always includes three sessions:
1) Situation Analysis - To develop a clear and common base of understanding among the attendees – in essence, the goal is to get everyone on the same page. This is clearly the session which is most “broadcast oriented”. We often interview participants in advance as well as conduct some independent analysis. We ALWAYS provide a structure/template for presentations and/or verbal representations to keep things short and to the point.
2) Options Generation - This is when the good ideas get generated (but not vetted). This is a totally facilitated session where the best sessions have only minimal intervention/referring role by the facilitator. C3 will generate frameworks and case examples to help stimulate the discussion. Often, we will invent frameworks “live” to help capture or build on ideas. Sometimes, this is a very challenging exercise in a company which is “stuck”.
3) Option Evaluation – During this segment the group discusses, chooses, refines and take the strategic actions which are fully supported by the group. A path forward should be developed to include specific deliverables which will need to be created, further analytical tasks to be conducted, methodological approaches to testing critical assumptions, etc. Dates and responsibilities should be assigned as in any good workplan.
As facilitators we believe it is important to have enough industry knowledge/language to ask the right questions, keep the discussion relevant, and utilize frameworks to stimulate discussion and capture information. It is also important that the facilitator avoid playing a content role in “the answers” as it is incumbent on the group to own their own results. This role is significantly different than that of a pure meeting facilitator and we always expect to engage with our sponsor AFTER the session to raise issues of concern to us relative to choices that may be made during the offsite.
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