Strategy Workshop: How to Run One That Reaches a Decision

TL;DR

• No decision rights, no decision. Settle before the day what the room is actually allowed to choose.
• Pre-work is the whole game: numbers, options and the baseline, in writing, a week ahead.
• Invite the people who own a decision or the delivery of one. Observers flatten the conversation.
• Make the room pick between options that cannot all be funded.
• Every output gets an owner, a date and a first visible step. Book the review before anyone leaves.

A strategy workshop is a day where people with authority turn a messy situation into a small number of decisions they will be held to. That is narrower than most strategy days attempt, and it is why most disappoint.

Research in Harvard Business Review puts it at two-thirds to three-quarters of large organisations that struggle with execution. And when Donald Sull and colleagues surveyed 4,012 people across 124 organisations, only 28% of managers responsible for carrying out strategy could list three of their company’s five priorities.

I have hosted and facilitated 800+ events over twenty years. The days that work are the ones where somebody did the unglamorous preparation, and somebody else held the room to a decision at four o’clock.

What makes a strategy workshop end in a decision?

The room has to know, before it sits down, which decisions are genuinely its to make.

Circulate them: three or four questions, phrased so a yes or no is possible by the end of the day. “Do we enter the Irish market in 2027, and by which of these two routes” is decidable. “How do we grow internationally” is a conversation.

Say what the day cannot decide, too: committed budgets, board matters, anything needing a vote elsewhere. A day that ends with six priorities and no decision has produced a to-do list with better typography.

What pre-work does a strategy workshop need?

Everything factual. If a slide on the day is the first time the room sees a number, you have lost two hours of your agenda to arithmetic.

Send a pack a week out. It needs four things:

• The situation in numbers: performance, market, cost base, customers lost and won. Facts only.
• Two to five candidate options at the same depth, each with what it costs and what it rules out.
• The baseline. The Treasury’s Green Book insists that business as usual, the outcome expected if current arrangements continue, is always carried through for comparison. Skip it and you overstate the gain from acting.
• The three questions the day will answer.

Worth stealing from. It asks practitioners to generate a wide variety of options before narrowing, and to record the reason each was kept or dropped. Writing down why you rejected something is the difference between a decision and a mood.

Give people a job with the pack: one page each, what you would choose and what you would stop.

Who should be in the room, and who should not?

The people who own a decision, the people who will deliver it, and nobody who is only there to watch.

Size is what organisers get wrong. Belbin, quoting Richard Hackman, calls excessive team size one of the worst impediments to collaboration, and reckons four people the ideal working unit. Eight to ten is the ceiling for a decision-making core. Past that the quiet ones stop contributing and the day becomes a performance.

Most strategy-day formats were designed for twelve people in a training room. Who to leave out, bluntly:

• Anyone whose only contribution is a status update.
• Deputies sent in place of the decision maker. A deputy cannot commit, so questions get taken away instead of answered.
• Supplier and agency teams, unless a session needs them. Candour drops once the room is not all one organisation.

If forty people genuinely need a voice, split the structure rather than the decision. The wider group feeds in through a morning breakout session, and a core of eight makes the call after lunch with that input in front of them. In bigger rooms I gather it through RoomReader, my own phone-based polling software, nothing to download.

The shape of a strategy workshop day

Four movements, in this order. Proportions matter more than the clock.

• Agree the facts, a fifth of the day. No debate about what is true. Questions on the pack, corrections, move on.
• Face the hard thing, a fifth. Name the issue everyone has been editing out of their slides. If nobody says it, the facilitator does.
• Choose, two fifths. The longest block, and the one that always gets squeezed.
• Commit, a fifth. Owners, dates, first steps, review date. Protected time, not the minutes left over.

The energy in a room is a curve, and I have watched it for twenty years. The slump lands around half past one, so put the choosing block there, where people are on their feet and arguing. If the workshop sits inside a wider team away day, keep the social part after the decision.

How do you stop it becoming a presentation marathon?

Ban the deck, then give the time it was occupying to argument.

Executives already average nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under ten in the 1960s, so nobody is short of being presented at. A strategy day is the rarest thing in their diary: hours with the right people in one room.

Rules that hold:

• Ten minutes maximum per input, and only where the pack left a real gap.
• Functional updates go in the pack or go nowhere.
• Nothing projected during the choosing block except the options and the criteria.
• The most senior person speaks last on each question. Otherwise you are not getting views, you are getting agreement.

That last one is hardest to enforce and most valuable. It is also why an outside facilitator earns the fee: I can interrupt a chief executive politely, and the head of marketing cannot.

How do you force a choice instead of a wish list?

Make the options compete for something scarce, and make the cost of each one visible before the vote.

Roger Martin’s argument in Harvard Business Review is that people retreat into planning because strategy frightens them: choosing one cuts off possibilities and options. A workshop that lets the room say yes to everything has let everyone off that hook.

What works:

Test the favourite before adopting it. Gary Klein’s premortem asks the group to imagine the plan has already failed and list the reasons, which gives permission to doubt out loud in front of whoever had the idea. Fifteen minutes, writing privately first. Most major business initiatives fail to deliver what was promised, so the quarter hour pays.

Capturing the decision: owner, date, and what changes

Write each decision on the wall in the room’s own words: one sentence, plus the owner, the date, and the first visible step.

A single owner, not a committee. Of Bain’s five RAPID roles, recommend, agree, perform, input and decide, only one recommender is assigned per decision. Shared ownership on a flipchart means nobody owns it by Friday.

The first step matters more than the plan. “Jo books the supplier meeting by 7 November” survives a busy fortnight. “Jo develops a go-to-market approach” does not.

Photograph the wall and circulate it the same afternoon, while people still remember their own shorthand.

What happens in the fortnight after the strategy workshop?

The owners report once in writing, and the first review date is in the diary before anyone goes home.

Kaplan and Norton found companies struggle to balance pressing operational concerns against long-term strategic priorities, and their example of a monthly meeting that drifted off strategy is the normal fate of a review. So protect it: separate meeting, strategy items only, operations banned.

Then say it out loud to everybody else. A decision nobody can repeat is not a priority, which is what that 28% really measures. The cascade belongs where people hear it and can ask about it, in a town hall or at a project kick-off meeting, not in a pack emailed on a Friday.

Where a facilitator earns the fee

Three jobs the leadership team cannot do while also taking part. Holding the clock, so the choosing block is not eaten by the facts block. Hearing the room, so whoever has gone quiet gets asked directly. And being the one who can say “that is not a decision, that is a hope” without a career consequence.

Professional adults engage readily when the format removes any risk of looking foolish. Cringe, not reluctance, kills participation, and a day of jargon exercises creates plenty of it.

I work as a conference facilitator as well as a host and moderator, quoted per event on length, preparation and travel, at a fixed price with no hidden extras.

If you have a date and three questions, send the agenda and I will tell you whether you need a facilitator or a stricter chair.