202109031143 strategy offsite
Alternative Titles: Strategy Offsite, Offsite
Located in: inbox
Status: 🌰 Seed
Designing an Offsite
- Know who your audience is. Answer the questions:
- Who is the audience?
- How experienced are they with the topics?
- Why are they bothering to show up?
- What are their concerns and objections?
- Focus and prioritize the outcomes. Ideally you have a single outcome/message, and the others are supporting it.
Agenda
Setup
- Someone, generally the leader, starts the offsite. They could talk about:
- The mission and vision of the organization/product
- Reiterate the purpose of the offsite
- The faciltator helps the group establish ground rules on how to behave. These could be negative behaviours to avoid like interrupting, looking at cellphones, etc. Or positive behaviours like clarity over certainity, ego is the enemy, etc.
Create Connections / Team Building
Use Icebreaker Questions, Team Building activities, Retrospectives, or other activities to build connections and trust with each other.
Inform
- Short presentations or reading that help to inform the group
- Aim for lightning talk style not lengthy presentations
Diverge
The purpose of this session is to come up with ideas, it's to create choices not eliminate or judge them. You can use various activities to help generate ideas. Use different formats or activities to keep people excited and engaged.
Converge
Ideally you have a break between the diverge and converge sessions. It allows people to switch mindsets, ponder the ideas, and get ready to make decisions.
Convergent activities generally fall into a few buckets:
- Analysis - Go over the pros and cons, ask questions that help to clarify ideas
- Decisions - Prioritize and group the ideas
- Planning - Build an action plan on implementing the ideas
Commit
Review the decisions and commit as a group to take action. This could mean going around the table and getting verbal commitment from everyone.