Strategy Retreat - Day 4
This post contains the activities for Day 4 of the strategy retreat. For more information and the links to the activities from other days, please see the strategy retreat post.
A pause for thought
By this point in the week, we had acheived reasonable certainity regarding our strategy.In order to complete these exercises, you need to be confident in the headlines of your strategy. If there is any doubt, I recommend taking a break to firm up the strategic headlines before continuing with the rest of the activities from here on in.
The exercises from days four and five could even be run at a followup retreat and it is definitely better not to rush!</em>
Revisiting the event arc
The personal development day appears in the arc of the event after we have spent three days talking about what the project needs. The personal development day is the chance to talk about what the individual team members need and want (a useful distinction!) in order to help them serve the project.
Day 4
Before you start - Opening Circle. See day 1.
Note that most of the day spent in small meetings between the team lead, HR team representative (if possible) and individual team members. Hence, it might be wise to suggest that people plan to have bi-lateral meetings or get on with other work while the individual sessions are on. For this reason, I have also not scheduled breaks this day - but do remember to take them when it fits with your flow!
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We kicked off the day with individual Personal Development Plans. I’d advise you to either talk to your HR person or Google for templates and existing wisdom on how to do this. We used a template we were given and made some project- specific tweaks to it. In this first session, people were given some time to complete their template individually.
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The team interests visualisation. The first stage of this exercise is conducted with each team member individually. You will need between 40-60 minutes per person, so depending on how many people you have, this can easily take a whole day.
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Closing activity. This is built off the team interests visualisation and gives a good opportunity to get everyone together to revisit how they are working as a team. Please see the link above for info on how to run this activity.