Strategy workshop facilitation
Helping teams build winning strategies together.
Collectively define and realize goals, while building actionable strategies for solving challengers.
What is strategy workshop facilitation?
Strategy workshop facilitation is when a group of people work with an expert facilitator to define a goal, then devise a plan to achieve it.
This requires a workshop facilitator – the guide in this process. In a series of structured strategy sessions, the facilitator takes the team through a sequence of hands-on exercises. The team collaborates to first define their long-term goal, agree on a metric by which to measure success, and then formulate a plan to get there.
What does strategy workshop facilitation involve?
A strategy workshop will span a day or two. Participants could be several members of a department, an executive team, or two companies coming together to collaborate on a project.
The workshop itself gets broken up into phases:
- The team runs through a series of exercises to define the problem they want to solve, or result they want to achieve.
- The team then explores how others have solved a similar problem, looking outside of their sector for ideas and inspiration.
- Moving forwards, the team works up a number of detailed new concepts and solutions designed to solve their problem.
- A series of voting exercises take place, enabling the team to critique their new solutions and decide on the best route(s).
- Finally, the team collaborate to chronologically map out their new strategy. They leave with a structured action plan to go ahead and execute.
What type of business can a strategy workshop help?
There’s no real limit to the kind of business that would benefit from a strategy workshop.
Any company or organization that is looking to make new plans, set new targets, or solve a new problem would be wise to try a strategy workshop.
I’ve run these kinds of workshops for startups, agencies, non-profits, and also for teams within larger businesses and enterprises.
As the facilitator, I don’t need to be an expert in your sector. In fact, I’m there as a neutral party, leaning you and your team as the subject matter experts.
My job is to provide a framework for you to solve the problem yourself.
What are the benefits of hiring a strategy workshop facilitator?
On the whole, people are not great at collaborating!
Within an existing team, all manner of internal politics and working-style differences can arise in a group meeting. The honest truth is that people are rarely trained to collaborate together.
- People talk over each other.
- The loudest person takes up too much airtime.
- Conversations wander and deviate from the item being discussed.
- Details are missed
- Ultimately, decisions are not made.
An experienced facilitator is neutral. They give everyone a voice and will come equipped with all the tools to avoid these issues and circumnavigate them if they arise.
Why should I hire Kayvan to facilitate a strategy workshop for my business?
I get no greater professional satisfaction than seeing a team come out of one of these sessions enthused about having solved a problem together.
Back when I used to run my own agency, I didn’t know how to use this approach.
I would frequently find myself as the most senior person in the room, being expected to have all the answers. I knew that I had team members who had great ideas to contribute, but I had no effective methodology to draw the answers out from them. If you’ve ever tried to run a strategy workshop yourself, you’ll know that a lot goes into getting it right.
I’ve since made it my mission to be one of the best facilitators around, using these skills I’ve developed to help teams in their strategic planning process.
Whether it’s for short or long term action plans, problem solving, or even for devising new internal processes, this approach delivers results.
