Research warns against letting the team turn up, ready to rumble, without a clear sense of what are the goals and expectations of the strategy offsite/awayday/annual thinkfest. Healey, Hodgkinson, Whittington and Johnson have found that clarity of objectives was the most important predictor of success of those offsite meetings. The most important. That’s something you can easily fix.
They also found that workshops that set out to aid strategy implementation were more likely to generate noticeable organisational outcomes than those focussed on strategy formulation.
That’s not to say workshops that explore context and possibilities and the effect of AI on our business are a poor use of time. The research says that even though they may not generate a set of agreed actions, these events add value by aligning everyone’s views and surfacing the issues. Its just that this is all a bit intangible and often participants fail to see the merit.
So, even more reason for very clearly communicating the purpose of the meeting.
Write an agenda with ‘purpose’ and ‘process’. Under process, describe the goal of each part and who will be asked to do what. “Sam will present X and the Team will be asked for feedback on the merits of X so that Jo can make a decision after the workshop” “Fred will ask the team for options to achieve Z and the team will be asked to evaluate and agree the preferred option”. That kind of thing.