Running Your Own Strategy Retreat: Agenda, Roles and Follow-Up

A strategy retreat is simply protected time away from daily operations to make a few important decisions about where the business is going. For a small company it doesn't require a resort, a large budget or an outside firm. A borrowed conference room, a clear purpose and a disciplined agenda will do more than an expensive venue with a vague one.

The difference between a retreat that changes things and one that produces a nice day and a forgotten flip chart usually comes down to preparation and follow-through. This guide covers both, along with a sample one-day agenda you can adapt.

Decide what the retreat is for

Start by naming the one or two decisions the day must produce. The Community Tool Box, a planning resource from the University of Kansas, puts it bluntly in its guide to meetings: "No clear goal? A boring and unfocused meeting may result!" Once you have a clear goal, it says, the agenda becomes your road map.

Good retreat goals are decisions, not topics. "Talk about growth" is a topic. "Decide which two customer segments we'll focus on next year and what we'll stop doing to make room" is a decision. If you can't state the goal in a sentence, the retreat isn't ready to schedule.

The same guide describes four phases of meeting management: planning, setting up, running the meeting and following up. A retreat is a long meeting, and all four phases apply.

Choose who should be in the room

Invite the people who will make and carry out the decisions, plus anyone with knowledge the group can't do without. The Community Tool Box advises thinking about who really needs to attend before you send out invitations, noting that people who don't care about the agenda usually don't come back.

In a small business this might be the owner, a business partner and two or three key employees. For example, imagine a seven-person catering company planning its retreat. The owner, the head chef and the events manager attend the full day. The bookkeeper joins for the hour on finances. That keeps the group small enough for real discussion while still bringing the right facts into the room.

Do the homework before the day

A retreat is a poor place to discover that nobody brought the numbers. The Community Tool Box tells planners to "Do your homework!" and to have needed information or research ready before the meeting begins. It also recommends listing the time planned for each agenda item and sending the agenda out at least a week ahead.

Useful pre-reads for a strategy retreat include:

• A one-page financial summary: revenue, margins, cash and trends
• What customers are saying, from reviews, complaints or a few short interviews
• A short status report on last year's priorities: done, not done and why
• Any decision memos framing the choices you plan to make

Ask attendees to read everything in advance and come with one or two written observations. That keeps the day for deciding, not for reading.

Pick a facilitator and a recorder

Someone needs to run the process while everyone else works on the content. The Community Tool Box describes a facilitator as someone who "isn't there to give opinions, but to draw out opinions and ideas of the group members," and who stays neutral. Its list of facilitator duties includes keeping the group on the agenda and involving everyone, "drawing out the quiet participants and controlling the domineering ones."

That's hard for an owner to do at their own retreat, because the owner usually has the strongest opinions in the room. Consider asking someone outside the decision to facilitate: a trusted peer business owner, a coach, or an advisor from a local Small Business Development Center.

Also assign a recorder. The Community Tool Box calls what the recorder captures the "group memory" and suggests recording items such as questions, answers, concerns, ideas from brainstorming and decisions. Without a recorder, the group remembers the day differently by the following week.

A sample one-day agenda

Adjust times to your goal and group. This hypothetical outline assumes a single strategic decision.

1. Opening (30 minutes). Restate the goal, review the agenda and agree on ground rules. The Community Tool Box lists common ground rules such as one person speaks at a time, listen to what others are saying, no mocking or attacking other people's ideas, and be on time coming back from breaks.
2. Look back (60 minutes). What worked last year, what didn't, and what you learned.
3. Look out (60 minutes). Customers, competitors and changes in your market, using the pre-read material.
4. Generate options (75 minutes). Lay out realistic choices, including doing nothing differently.
5. Lunch.
6. Test the leading options (90 minutes). For each option, ask what you would need to believe about customers, your industry, competitors and your own capabilities for it to make sense, a question Roger Martin poses in Harvard Business Review. Then run a premortem.
7. Decide and plan (75 minutes). Make the call and turn it into actions.
8. Close (30 minutes). Agree on what you'll tell the rest of the team and when.

Run a premortem on your favorite option

Groups tend to fall in love with the option they discussed most. A premortem is a simple antidote. As Gary Klein described it in Harvard Business Review in 2007, team members assume the project they are planning has just failed and then generate plausible reasons for its demise. Klein's point is that people with reservations can speak freely at the outset, so the plan can be improved rather than autopsied later.

In practice, give everyone five minutes to write reasons silently, then go around the room. Group the reasons, and decide which risks you can reduce now and which ones you'll watch.

Follow through, or it didn't happen

The last phase, following up, is where most retreats fail. Turn decisions into an action plan before anyone leaves. The Community Tool Box says each action step should include what will happen, who will carry it out, by when, what resources are needed and who should be told.

It also reminds planners that an action plan "is always a work in progress" and recommends keeping it visible and revising it, usually monthly. Send the recorder's notes and the action plan to attendees within a few days, put a 30-day check-in on the calendar before the retreat ends, and review progress at your regular team meetings after that.

Key takeaways

• Define the retreat by the one or two decisions it must produce, not by topics.
• Invite the people who will decide and execute, and send the agenda and pre-reads a week ahead.
• Use a neutral facilitator and a dedicated recorder; the owner rarely does both well.
• Test leading options by asking what you'd need to believe, then run a premortem.
• Leave with an action plan that names who does what by when, and schedule the first check-in.

Sources

• Community Tool Box, University of Kansas, Chapter 16, Section 1: Conducting Effective Meetings
• Community Tool Box, University of Kansas, Chapter 16, Section 2: Developing Facilitation Skills
• Community Tool Box, University of Kansas, Chapter 16, Section 3: Capturing What People Say: Tips for Recording a Meeting
• Community Tool Box, University of Kansas, Chapter 8, Section 5: Developing an Action Plan
• Gary Klein, Performing a Project Premortem, Harvard Business Review (September 2007)
• Roger L. Martin, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, Harvard Business Review (January–February 2014)