Clarify objectives, plan carefully, engage participants, and communicate clearly to ensure your strategy workshop delivers the expected results. This will help you produce a realistic, measurable, and actionable strategic plan. Click the Strategy Workshop to learn more.
Identify and invite all relevant stakeholders, including middle managers. These are the people that hold the keys to your strategic success.
It’s important to be clear on the objectives of a strategy workshop from the outset. This gives participants a solid focus and sets the tone for discussion, ensuring that conversations are productive and lead to tangible outcomes. Objectives might include defining a new go-to-market strategy, exploring emerging technologies, or refining positioning strategies.
It is also vital to write a comprehensive agenda for the session. This is the single most important preparation activity. Without an agenda, a strategy workshop will have no structure and is almost certain to go off the rails. Create an agenda that allocates time for structured discussions, creative brainstorming sessions, and practical planning. Make sure that you also include time for discovering ideas/insights (divergence) and decision-making or prioritization (convergence).
Once the agenda has been finalized, circulate it to all participants and ensure that they are aware of the goals of the session. Identify key stakeholders and invite them to attend, as well as any supporting staff that may be required to help facilitate. It’s also a good idea to hold the strategy workshop in an offsite location, or at least in a quiet, private space that allows for full concentration.
An expert strategist can be instrumental in unlocking new insights and encouraging participation. They can also support the group in determining how to implement the strategic plan and provide ongoing accountability. It’s also helpful to choose a facilitator who has experience working with the specific industry and/or strategic planning methodologies.
A skilled and experienced facilitator can also promote a safe environment where participants feel comfortable sharing their perspectives and ideas, even if they are not ‘good’. A good facilitator will also be able to identify and address any issues that arise during the workshop, helping to keep the session on track.
It’s also a good idea to conduct a debrief session after the workshop. This is an opportunity for participants to share their feedback on the agenda, pre-session communication, design of the day, and how the facilitator performed during the session. This will help to inform future strategy workshops.
Ideation
The purpose of a strategy workshop is to get all the key players in your business on the same page. A clear harmonisation of everyone’s ideas, opportunities, and plans helps ensure that your company stays relevant, committed to growth, and continues to deliver the best possible outcomes for your customers.
A strategy session can be a time of intense discussion and debate, but it’s important to keep the focus on the outcome that you want to achieve. To do this, it’s essential to have a clear set of objectives, write a comprehensive agenda, prepare for the session, and engage all participants. This will give your strategy workshop direction, pace and purpose.
Strategy sessions can be a breeding ground for great change, but you need to take the time to do things right. The single most important step in a strategy session is preparing for it. This means writing a comprehensive agenda, identifying the goals and participants, and planning the exercises. Getting this right is the only way to guarantee success and to avoid wasting time.
It’s also important to remember that strategy workshops are usually part of a regular strategic development process and not a reaction to a particular incident. Those that are, are typically triggered by organisational development needs or teambuilding.
To begin the strategy session it’s a good idea to start with a quick introduction of the participants to each other. Getting everyone to share their name, role, and something fun about them will break the ice and help to get the conversation started. This is a great time to read out the strategic objective that you’ve carefully crafted for the session too.
The next part of the session is a series of creative problem solving exercises. These will identify the key issues, challenges and risks that you face and explore potential solutions. These are a great time to utilise tools and techniques such as the Solution Board, Problem Solving Matrix, Dragon’s Den and What Would You Do? to generate a wide range of innovative ideas. These will then be evaluated and prioritized based on the impact, feasibility, and alignment with the product’s strategic objectives.
Vision
The key to a successful strategy workshop is ensuring that all participants understand what the desired outcomes are for the session. Whether it be a detailed roadmap for growth, new marketing initiatives or a clear plan of how to divert resources into certain markets, the end goal is set from the outset. This focuses the minds of all those involved, and gives them something to work towards throughout the session.
It also makes it much easier to keep the workshop on track when things begin to derail. This is especially important as the session involves teams from different departments and levels of management, allowing them to come together in a collaborative environment that fosters innovation and creativity that can’t always emerge in a day-to-day business setting. An experienced strategic thinking & discovery facilitator is key for guiding discussions and keeping the workshop focused, preventing it from becoming an irrelevant brainstorming session.
In addition to enabling teams to align on their vision, objectives and strategies, a good strategy workshop is a great way to gain valuable market insights into your competitors. During the session, it’s possible to identify new opportunities and threats that you can use to create a stronger competitive advantage.
As a result of these findings, it’s not surprising that workshops are seen as effective tools for developing and communicating strategy in organisations. Despite some concerns about the value of formal strategy design, such as those outlined by Henry Mintzberg in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad in Competing for the Future, it’s likely that strategy workshops will continue to be an integral part of strategic management in the 21st century.
Despite their apparent value in creating a vision and strategy, strategy workshops are not without challenges. They require careful preparation and imaginative orchestration so that facts, experience and gut-feel merge to create innovative strategic concepts. They often involve high political stakes, and can feel like herding wild cats if the prework isn’t done right or the facilitation isn’t strong enough. Yet, when these three components are in place, strategy workshops can elevate collaboration and decision-making and lead to significant business benefits.
Action
Strategy workshops are a great way to gather the collective intelligence of your teams and develop an actionable plan for the future. However, it is important to be clear on what you are hoping to achieve from your strategy workshop, as this will help guide the discussion and ensure that your objectives are met.
A clear set of goals should be established at the beginning of your workshop, whether it is defining a new strategy, reassessing current market positioning, or improving the value proposition for customers. Having specific objectives is crucial to making sure that the right topics are discussed, and that the participants feel focused throughout the workshop.
Having clear objectives will also ensure that your workshop is productive and provides tangible outputs. This is especially important when dealing with strategy workshops that are aimed at more complex issues, such as business innovation, M&A, or the entry into new markets. It is vital to allocate time for discovery activities, creative brainstorming sessions, and practical planning.
It is also important to have a clearly defined agenda for your strategy workshop, which should include both structured discussions and creative activities that encourage idea-sharing and divergent thinking. This will make it easier for everyone to keep track of the progress being made during the session. It is also a good idea to provide participants with a summary of the key outcomes and next steps at the end of the workshop, so that they are aware of what is expected of them.
The benefits of a well-run strategy workshop can be significant, including fresh ideas, joined-up thinking, and a motivated team. Unlike the ‘top down’ approach to strategic planning that Mintzberg criticised, strategy workshops are particularly suited to contemporary flat organisations with decentralised decision-making and knowledge-based management. However, the success of a strategy workshop is dependent on many factors, and careful preparation and imaginative orchestration are required to create the best possible outcome. If you are looking to run a strategy workshop in your organisation, or would like to learn more about how we can help with the process, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.