YOU NEED TO ADJUST YOUR STRATEGY AND GET EVERYONE’S BUY-IN
Here’s how you can run
your strategy offsite
Gone are the days of setting a strategy for years to come, expecting the external world to remain static. Today, every six months unfolds a new super-crisis, demanding your rapid adaptation and strategic alignment.
What typically happens during strategy offsites
Top Down Sending
…the top leader has a brilliant plan worked out and presents it to their top team, expecting clarifying questions, followed by full buy-in and ownership in the form of making it happen and taking the whole organisation along for the ride.
Instead, everyone goes back to their silos and deploys their own micro-strategy that may or may not be a good interpretation of the big picture. The other downside? You haven’t drawn upon the full wisdom that’s in the room.
OR
Joint Brainstorming
... the top team gets together and has a productive session on how the new era for the business should look. There are multiple perspectives, stakeholders, ideas and a lot of wisdom in the room.
The problem? A structure is missing to find the right ‘cruising altitude’ and go from great ideas to deploying the right strategy. What looks like eye-level brainstorming contains an undercurrent of personal stakes. Conversations are inevitably biased, and so are the outcomes.
We believe that work and fun go together.
The best offsites combine togetherness and work deep dives.
Culture-building experiences and strategy sessions.
Transforming the sources of conflict and celebrating together.
OUR TEAM OFFSITE PHILOSOPHY
1. Let’s come together to sharpen the saw
Take your people out of the operational whirlwind to focus on what truly matters: unity, strategy adjustment, and realignment. It's about sharpening the saw together, ensuring your leadership and teams are not just coping, but thriving amid constant change.
2. Let’s dive below the waterline
Our strategy interventions are designed to go beyond the content-layer into the interpersonal layer and world of values. In a top leadership team it’s normal (and great!) for opinions to diverge and approaches to clash. Our role is to hold the space for your team to go there and come back our, facilitating constructive conflict resolution. This ensures everyone is aligned, with a clear understanding of the strategy to be executed.
3. Let’s cultivate a collective mindset
The most sophisticated strategy can falter without the right mindset. Our approach focuses on aligning every member of your team to the collective goal, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment. It's about turning individual contributions into a powerful, cohesive force where the sum is greater than its parts.
WE DON'T WILDLY FLAP OUR ARMS TO OPERATIONALISE A NEW TOOL
It’s not about Design Thinking, OKRs or how agile you are. It’s about attuning to the right strategy and for everyone to know exactly how to contribute to making it happen.
Your gain working strategic magic with us
FACILITATION WITH A STRATEGY BRAIN
You’re not just getting senior facilitators who know exactly which methods, prompts and exercises help your team have the right kind of transformative day. We know how to build and execute strategies and act as the neutral external party that can get away with pointing out blind spots and surfacing tensions that would otherwise be silently buried and dragged along with you.
COLLECTIVE COMMITMENT
We hold the space for you to fully engage in the content of your new strategic direction so that we surface every single underlying “I don’t get it” and “I don’t want it” and transform it. You’ll walk away with more than strategic buy-in: an identification with your new direction and the understanding how each of you contributes to making it happen.
UNLOCKING YOUR COLLECTIVE GENIUS
In the unpredictable landscape of today's business world, no single mind can grasp the full spectrum of challenges and opportunities your organization faces. Our approach harnesses your team’s diverse expertise. Together, you’ll question the status quo, explore groundbreaking perspectives and collaborate on your innovative strategies, turning 1+1 into 3.
How we co-design your stratefy offsite
1) Intro Session
We hop on a call and ask you a lot of questions: about who you are, who you aren’t, what your strategy to date has been, what your last 6 months look like, what your next 6 months should look like, how the current level of buy-in is and what threats you perceive to your team alignment.
2) Co-creation
Based on what you’ve given us and perhaps enriched by survey data or leadership team interviews, we’ll propose and approach and design. We’ll present it to you/ your small co-creation team and then shoot at the design together to see which parts still stand afterwards.
3) The Details
In our last design phase we’ll iron out final kinks and make sure all the details are right. It’ll be clear which parts are top-down messages and which parts you’ll work on together. Your team will have what it needs to come into the workshop prepared and with an open mind. We can’t wait to work magic together!
Let’s have a virtual coffee and talk about how you can re-build your plane while flying it.
FAQs
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We work with high-growth startups to big established companies from AI to automotive. You are the experts in your field. We are the experts in leadership, collaboration, communication and a few other areas like sustainability, gender-positive leadership and how the brain works…
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We are explicitly not proponets of a given school of thought, but rather draw on the newest research from a myriad of different specialities: organisational psychology, neuroscience, experience design, social movements, mindfulness, philosophy to name a few.
Our underlying belief system: We want a world that works for all. To move minds you need to move hearts. If it’s fun, it’s good.
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Our approach is experiential, meaning you’re much more likely to have your hands in play dough than just leaning back and listening.
We’ve got a big bag of tricks to draw upon and gauge just how “out there” it makes sense to be together. Where useful, we are happy to employ external methods, such as Barrett Analytics or the Neurocolor personality assessment.
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Ideally an offsite takes place out of your usual context, simply because context affects how we behave. We’d rather work with you in a converted barn, go hiking or be in a beautiful place in nature.
Different context, different ideas. It’s great if the place matches the quality you are wanting to invite in.
But we can make magic happen anywhere.
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While we love having a couple of months to co-create, design and prepare our work, we’ve been known to whip up a 5-course leadership offsite in a matter of days, so last-minute requests are welcome.
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In person? 500. Online 2.000.
Although those are big kahunas. We are absolutely smitten to work with intimate teams: three is a team.
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Send us a note and let’s find a time to have a virtual coffee soon. Kudos if you actually bring a coffee.
