Part One – Designing your Planning Session
Getting your team together and on the same page via a planning session is a great move.
As you’ve probably experienced, most well-designed planning sessions will provide clarity, connection and certainty for those involved.
If you’ve put reasonable thought into the session, you should be able to:
- Gain clarity for your team re direction and focus areas for current and future work
- Develop a greater level of connection across your team
- See a stronger sense of purpose amongst the team
Essential elements of your planning session
With 30 years of practice in this space, there are a few essentials I’ve learned along the way and will share them here over the next few weeks.
As a hint of what’s to come, here are the big-ticket items we’ll cover:
- The top three areas to consider in session design
- Getting participants primed
- Developing a great vision statement
- Follow-up and tracking
The top three areas to consider in session design
1. Give it the time it deserves
This is a good test to see if you really need a planning session. You’re busy and your team is busy.
If you treat the planning session as another ‘busy’ exercise your team won’t give the consideration needed to produce something that matters.
Take a deep breath and hide away for half an hour to map out the purpose of the session and the three key outcomes it needs to deliver. Think of how much time you’ll realistically need to get everyone focused, clarify the task and get them into planning mode. This should give you an indication of how much time you’ll need to run the session.
2. Know where your team is at
Yep, it’s poor grammar, but you get what I mean…
I recently had a client keen to do a planning session with his Board. They were moving to take on a new advocacy role and the session was focused on the strategic priorities and key activities associated with the role. Fortunately for us, a Board member had sent a ‘red flag’ email the evening before the workshop. They were nowhere near ready to do any formal planning in this space – they still wanted to understand the risks and opportunities.
We ‘met them where they were’ and discussed the risks and opportunities and mapped out next steps around them. Pushing on with ‘Plan A’ would’ve been a trainwreck (to use a technical term!) met with resistance and leading to frustration for all.
3. Have a clear and simple framework
I’ve already thrown out a clue on this…
Define your purpose (the ‘why’) of undertaking the planning; then outline the three key outcomes needed.
Then structure your planning around three basic steps:
- What – what are the critical facts, information or evidence that need to be considered?
- So What – what are the potential impacts and what does this mean for our, organisation, team or stakeholders?
- Now What – what strategies or initiatives need to be implemented over the short, medium or long-term?
Now you’re off and running.
In the next instalment we’ll look at getting participants primed for the planning session.
In the meantime, grab the Session design guide to help you get moving.
Of course if you can’t wait that long, or need a hand with session design and facilitation, get in touch or book a 20 minute planning session.
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