Facilitation and meetings
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9 min read
Key findings
Twelve people for two eight-hour days is 192 hours, which justifies a written brief agreed with the sponsor before the venue.
Interviewing participants in advance exposes hidden agendas and gaps between the sponsor's view and the group's.
Action planning can take a whole morning or afternoon, so the agenda closes on the second afternoon.
Participants must know at every step whether they are deciding or recommending.
Twelve people for two eight-hour days is 192 hours of the organisation's most expensive time.
A leadership offsite agenda works backwards from the decisions the team must leave with.
Agree those decisions with the sponsor first, along with the decision rule and the themes from interviews with participants.
Then place the hardest discussion late on day one, converge on day two, and keep a full morning or afternoon for action planning.
The request usually arrives with the venue already booked, and with the last offsite remembered as useful by people who cannot say what it produced.
What Two Days Buys
Twelve people for two eight-hour days is 192 hours of the organisation's most expensive time.
That figure justifies a written brief, and it also sets the test.
Three outcomes are worth that money.
A decision that cannot be taken by email
A shared reading of something contested
Relationships that will carry a hard year
The third is legitimate, and it is the one most often used to justify an offsite with no agenda.
Where relationships are the purpose, the brief says so, and the design follows.
When To Decline
Merianne Liteman, Sheila Campbell and Jeff Liteman list ten intentions with which a facilitator should not agree to run an offsite.
Improving morale through the event alone
Rewarding people for hard work
Finding and punishing people who are not team players
Advancing a covert agenda
Controlling the conversation
Avoiding conflict
Giving the leader a platform for their own ideas
Disregarding what participants recommend
Defending the leader's position or the status quo
Keeping up a tradition of annual offsites
They argue that an offsite with any of these aims does more harm than good, and that people find out what the leader is doing.
Three further cases come up in an internal adviser's week.
A decision that has already been taken makes the offsite an exercise in agreement.
A sponsor who will not attend the difficult part removes the person who owns the decision.
A stated purpose of team building, when the problem is structural, sends the group away with the problem intact.
The adviser says what could be run instead, and what the two days would otherwise cost.
The Brief Before The Venue
Six items settle an offsite, and they take one conversation with the sponsor.
The decisions the two days must produce
The decision rule for each, with the sponsor's role stated
The people who must be present for each decision
What is out of scope
What happens to the output, and who writes it
What the sponsor will do differently afterwards
The sixth item changes the design.
A sponsor who will change nothing has commissioned a communication event, which is legitimate and is designed differently.
Liteman and colleagues also ask the client for specific commitments.
The client has no hidden agenda, intends to implement the action plans, will not punish anyone for what they say, and gives the facilitator access to participants beforehand.
The second item connects to workshops that end in decisions, which sets out the decision rules and the record.
Interviews With Participants
Liteman and colleagues call it a mistake to design an offsite without interviewing participants in advance, because the client does not hold all the information.
They tell of an offsite planned only from the president's account of a harmonious company, where the last group presentation on day two described staff feeling abused by management.
For an offsite of ten to twenty participants they suggest interviewing all of them, and they find telephone interviews effective, because people are often more candid on the phone.
Their rules for the interviews are short.
Report broad themes only, and tell the client so in advance
Give no opinions and pass on nothing from other interviews
Keep each interview to an hour or less
Interview the client last, and probe the gaps between the client's view and the themes
Two of their sample questions carry most of the value.
What might impede the group from achieving the outcome
How is conflict or disagreement handled here
The themes go into the opening session in the participants' own words.
Who Should Attend
Attendance is usually decided by grade, which is the wrong criterion.
Three questions produce a better list.
Who has to agree for each decision to hold
Who holds evidence the group will need on the day
Who will have to carry out the decision on Monday
Liteman and colleagues describe groups of twenty or fewer as able to spend more time in whole group conversation, with breakout groups of fewer than ten.
A group chosen by grade tends to discuss everything and decide nothing, because the people who can settle each question are only partly present.
An Offsite Agenda Hour By Hour
The agenda below is an illustration, for a team of twelve that must take three decisions, called A, B and C.
Day one runs as follows.
09:00 Opening. The three decisions, the decision rule and the interview themes. Output: a confirmed list of decisions
09:45 Shared facts. Three numbers everyone accepts, and one outside input of thirty minutes or less. Output: a fact sheet
11:00 Decision A, options. Criteria first, then options against them. Output: agreed criteria and a shortlist
13:30 Decision A, integration. Mixed groups of four work through the hardest disagreement. Output: a draft proposal
15:15 Decision B, options. The same sequence, at a faster pace. Output: a shortlist
16:45 Consolidation. The facilitator condenses the day's charts onto a few pages. Output: the list of open items
17:30 Close. What is settled and what is open, said aloud
Day two runs as follows.
08:30 Second thoughts. Anyone may add what occurred to them overnight
08:50 Decision A, proposal and poll. The sponsor decides. Output: decision A
09:50 Decisions B and C. Proposals, polls and sponsor decisions. Output: decisions B and C
11:35 Action planning. Owners, dates, budgets and how to tell the people who were not there. Output: the action plan
13:05 Read-back and close. Every decision read aloud with its owner and date
14:00 Lunch and departure
Ending on the second afternoon rather than the evening is a design choice, and senior groups tend to welcome it.
Participants who discover afterwards that their decisions were denied, amended beyond recognition or ignored find the whole process dispiriting.
The Difficult Middle
Sam Kaner and colleagues describe a groan zone in every hard group decision.
People in it struggle to understand perspectives they do not share, and they often read the struggle as failure.
In a two day design the zone usually arrives in the afternoon of day one.
Naming it at the opening prevents the question of whether the session is working.
Liteman and colleagues suggest ending each day on a hopeful note.
They add that participants who leave day one somewhat unsettled may make better recommendations after working through it overnight.
That is the reason to place the hardest integration in the afternoon of day one.
Deciding Or Recommending
Liteman and colleagues insist that participants know at every step whether they are deciding or recommending.
They also advise stating whether recommendations must fit current resources of time, money and people.
They note that participants who discover afterwards that their decisions were denied, amended beyond recognition or ignored find the whole process dispiriting.
The brief's second item settles this in advance, and the opening session says it aloud.
The Sponsor's Role
Liteman and colleagues call the pattern in which leaders dominate the discussion, or make others afraid to say what the leader might not want to hear, the Big Kahuna Effect.
Their remedies include coaching the leader beforehand, agreeing how the facilitator will respond if the leader forgets the advice, and including activities in which opinions are expressed anonymously.
They also advise clients not to use an offsite as a platform for their own ideas, and to listen more than they talk.
Three arrangements follow.
The sponsor opens with the decision rule and the constraints, then leaves the first session
The sponsor speaks last on any question where their view is already known
The sponsor takes the decisions openly at the end
The version that fails is a sponsor who says the group will decide and then overrules it before dinner.
The method for agreeing this with the sponsor is in challenging a leader you advise.
Prework And What To Bring
Liteman and colleagues prefer prework to briefings during the offsite, on the ground that an offsite is not a staff meeting.
They expect uneven compliance.
In a two day design they schedule the activities that depend on prework for day two, so that anyone who has not finished can do so on the first evening.
They also suggest a briefing book handed out in advance.
Four items earn their place.
A short pre-read, sent five days before
Three numbers everyone accepts as accurate
One outside input, kept under thirty minutes
The decisions, written up where everyone can see them
An outside speaker who runs for ninety minutes has used a tenth of the offsite and moved nothing.
Evenings And White Space
Liteman and colleagues call the time between formal sessions white space, and they prefer an overnight stay because some of the most meaningful work happens in it.
They tell of a chief executive and a department head who argued on a dock at night.
The department head had agreed to a reorganisation that afternoon and disagreed with it.
Their remedy is to open the next morning by asking whether anyone has new ideas or second thoughts.
Two design decisions matter more than the venue.
Whether an activity is compulsory, since a senior person who dislikes it will spend the evening signalling that
Whether the facilitator attends, since presence can inhibit spontaneity
Action Planning
Liteman and colleagues say action planning can take several hours and possibly a whole morning or afternoon, and that it should not be rushed or left to the last minute.
They advise consolidating the first day's notes onto a few charts overnight, since picking action points from a blizzard of flip charts wastes the time.
The plan assigns responsibilities, fixes dates and defines how progress will be measured.
It also covers what participants will say on their first day back to colleagues who were not there.
The Record
The record is the deliverable, and it is written on the second morning.
It has four lines per decision.
The decision, in one sentence
The owner, named
The first action and its date
Any dissent, attributed
The sponsor reads it back before anyone leaves, and it is corrected there.
A record circulated three days later is negotiated by email and loses content.
The Thirty Day Test
An offsite has worked when something visible has changed within a month.
Three checks are available, and none needs a survey.
The named actions have started, and each owner can say what was done
Something in the operating rhythm has changed, such as a meeting stopped or a decision moved
Four participants asked separately can name the same two decisions
The third check exposes an offsite that everyone enjoyed.
An Adviser's Own Boss As Client
Liteman and colleagues recommend against running an offsite for your own supervisor.
It is almost impossible to be seen as neutral, and few internal facilitators stand up forcefully to their boss.
They suggest an internal facilitator from outside the reporting line, a partnership with an external facilitator, or an external facilitator alone.
Where the offsite concerns the operating model of the function the adviser leads, the adviser should hand the running of it to someone else.
Disagreements that surface during the two days are covered in disagreement in a leadership meeting.
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor covers the offsite brief, the decision rules and the decision record in its facilitation component and its template pack.
The contracting conversation with the sponsor sits in its stakeholder conversation component.
Related reading: virtual workshop facilitation.
Sources
1. Liteman, M., Campbell, S. and Liteman, J. Retreats That Work: Everything You Need to Know About Planning and Leading Great Offsites. Pfeiffer.
2. Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S. and Berger, D. Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Jossey-Bass.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
What should be on a leadership offsite agenda?
The decisions the team must take, the decision rule for each, shared facts, options against agreed criteria, the hardest discussion late on day one, proposals and polls on day two, several hours of action planning, and a read-back of every decision.
How long should a leadership offsite be?
Length follows the number of decisions. Two days suit three or so decisions and allow an overnight stay, which Liteman and colleagues prefer because useful work happens in the informal time between sessions. Keep a full morning or afternoon for action planning.
How do you structure a two-day offsite?
Open with the decisions, rule and interview themes. Use day one for facts, options and the hardest integration. Ask for second thoughts on the morning of day two, then take proposals, polls and decisions, plan actions, and close by reading back the record.
What activities work at an executive offsite?
Vary the format: whole group conversation, mixed groups of fewer than ten, silence and writing before speaking, anonymous input on sensitive issues, and unstructured evening time. Keep presentations short and put reading in prework.
What prework should happen before an offsite?
Interview participants by phone or in person, sending back themes only. Send a short pre-read and a briefing book, and agree three numbers everyone accepts. Schedule work that relies on the prework for day two.
How do you make sure an offsite leads to action?
Fix the decision rule beforehand, give action planning enough hours, write the record on the second morning, read it back before anyone leaves, and check at 30 days whether actions have started and participants can name the same decisions.
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