By Rob Allison, freelance facilitator for BVSC and local charities

Strategy days and collaborative workshops (if done really well) can get everyone on the same page about the future direction of your charity and give everyone a lift in challenging times:

•    celebrating progress and challenges overcome
•    enabling open and honest conversations that enable people to feel genuinely heard
•    agreeing together where you want to get to as a charity and key actions and milestones for getting there 

However they can feel like a missed opportunity if:

•    the day becomes just a longer Board meeting with more papers and presentations
•    the day doesn’t lead to a clear set of conclusions and next steps
•    the facilitator has little real insight, experience and empathy on how charities work

A good facilitator says very little but enables everyone else to contribute effectively and equally - including the CEO - which can be far more difficult to achieve when the facilitator is the CEO.

Here are three top tips on how you can achieve a genuinely effective strategy day – one which really does get everyone on the same page on your future direction.

1.    Scope you want to achieve, and then design the day to flow with pace

I find CEOs know exactly what questions they want the day to address, but then appreciate a little bit of assistance in converting those into a flowing and well-paced format. Workshops are like driving a car – no-one starts the day in fifth gear, so design the strategy day in layers so that the narrative flows easily from section to section, taking people from first gear in the opening intros through to fifth gear by the final section. 

Keep it fast and pacy and get attendees to prioritise points – e.g. if it’s a multi-table format then perhaps 20 minutes discussion and 10 minutes feedback with 1 or 2 points from each table so you know what’s really important, otherwise you just get a page of scribbled notes with little idea of what is really important and what is more incidental. 

And give people plenty of regular time-checks – “one minute to go” is hopeless if they’re still on the first question. I usually give 3 or 4 time-checks for a 20 minute discussion so that table facilitators can pace accordingly.

 
Group photo following a strategy day for the Aston Villa Foundation

2.    Get the room layout right

Many venues will set up a Board strategy day as a long Board table with the data projector and screen at one end - everyone gets their laptops out and goes into “Board meeting” mode.

So for a Board strategy day, I will often remove tables completely for a whole-group discussion - a horseshoe of chairs which creates a very different and open dynamic. 

For a staff strategy day, I arrange the tables in a horseshoe so everyone is really close to the feedback area and can see and hear more easily. This makes it feel less like a conference and more like a workshop.

 
The Board and senior managers of Autism West Midlands as they worked up key actions and milestones for their strategic plan

3.    Use a wall to display the narrative that develops during the day

Whenever I check out a potential venue, I look for a decent stretch of wall, glass or room dividers large enough to take all of the discussion points in one easy-to-see block. This is incredibly powerful because people can see the narrative emerging during the day, they can see how one section flows into the next, and they can see how the issues and opportunities they identify at the beginning of the day then lead to the agreed actions and next steps at the end of the day.

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre have a great wall in their training room which was very useful for this collaborative workshop

And finally….

Since turning freelance six years ago, I have facilitated over 200 workshops for 60 charities, statutory agencies and partnerships across the Midlands including 9 workshops for BVSC now. I specialise in strategy days and collaborative workshops so if you need some help with designing and delivering a really effective day or half-day with your Board, leadership team, staff teams, volunteers, service users and / or partner agencies, please e-mail me at [email protected] to discuss your ideas further.