Analytical Mind » Facilitation

The Strategic Café or “A bottom-up approach to setting a corporate strategy” (Day 2)

Martin Proulx — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:41:01 +0000

As a follow-up to my earlier blog post on this topic, below is the agenda of our meeting as well as the questions asked during the sessions. If you are not already doing so, I strongly recommend you start using this facilitation approach to improve your meetings – including your next Strategy Definition meeting.

Strategic Café

If you would like more information on how to organize your own Strategic Café, you can drop me an email (martin [at] analytical-mind.com). I’d be happy to help.

Strategic Café

Agenda – Day 2

Breakfast (8:00 to 8:25)

Welcome and meeting introduction (8:25 to 8:30)

Presentation of our initiatives for the next 6 months (8:30 to 11:00)

Strategic Café

Pause (11:00 to 11:30)

Strategic Café

Prioritization of our initiatives for the next 6 months (11:30 to 12:15)

Lunch (12:15 to 1:00)

Strategic Café

World Café – Strategic assessment of our environment (1:00 to 2:30)

Background: To correctly set up our strategies, we must understand the environment in which we operate for: our consulting service, our products, and our training.

Question: What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in each sector of activity?

Tables:

Products
Products
Consulting Service
Consulting Service
Training

Mechanics: The participants are allowed 12 minutes at each table.

Strategic Café

Pause (2:30 to 3:00)

World Café – Operational improvements (3:00 to 4:30)

Background: In order to continue our growth, we must give ourselves the means to grow up, what are the improvements that wants to carry out: sales, marketing, finance, human resources and SME.

Question: How does improve on our operations to do the goals we had set?

Tables:

Sales
Marketing
Finance
Human Resources
Subject Matter Experts

Mechanics: The participants are allowed 20 minutes at each table.

Strategic Café

Posted in Collaboration and teamwork, community, Leadership, Strategy Tagged: agile management, Facilitation, Pyxis, Strategic Planning, Strategic Process, Strategy, world café

The Strategic Café or “A bottom-up approach to setting a corporate strategy” (Day 1)

Martin Proulx — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:20:38 +0000

If you ever had a chance to participate in a Strategy Definition meeting, you either had a good time because YOU were dictating the strategy to follow or had an awful experience because your recommendations were totally altered, down-graded to a point of irrelevance or blown out of proportion making them un-achievable. Needless to say, for most people a Strategy Definition meeting is an experience comparable to a visit to the dentist for a root canal.

As I already mentioned, not only is our organizational structure different from most organizations but so is our strategic process. As opposed to a top-down Strategy Definition where the Top Executives come up with the Strategy, we use a bottom-up approach. Once again, we rely on the wisdom of the crowd to come up with the best strategy we can achieve. Not only is the strategy sound, it also removes the need to obtain buy-in after the fact since employees participated in the definition of their strategy.

We’ve implemented a Balanced Score Cards approach to our strategic planning process 6 months ago. This approach is helping us move forward but the format of our previous meetings left a lot of room for improvement. After asking around for an alternate approach for the meeting, François suggested we try a World Café format. After reading about the principles and the book (The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter), we spent time preparing and planning for the meeting. Needless to say, the Strategic Café was a huge success.

World Café used to Define the Corporate Strategy

I want to sharing with you the agenda of the meeting as well as the questions asked during the sessions. If you are not already doing so, I strongly recommend you start using this facilitation approach to improve your meetings – including your next Strategy Definition meeting.

If you would like more information on how to organize your own Strategic Café, you can drop me an email (martin [at] analytical-mind.com). I’d be happy to help.

Agenda – Day 1

Breakfast (8:00 to 8:25)

Welcome and meeting introduction (8:25 to 8:30)

Warming up the brain cells (8:30 to 8:45)

We asked participants to compete in a friendly game of Rush Hour. The intend was to introduce a fun element in the day in preparation for the meeting.

Strategic Café

World Café – Retrospection of the previous 6 months (8:45 to 10:30)

Background: What should be done to improve the organization on the following 5 dimensions: communication, accountability, prioritization, leadership and decision making?

Question: What are the challenges encountered within the organization and what is my contribution to meeting these challenges?

5 Tables: Communication, Accountability, Prioritization, Leadership, and Decision Making.

Mechanics: The participants are allowed 15 minutes at each table.

At the end of the exercise: Each of the 5 paper-table-cloths is assigned to an individual responsible to come up with a plan of actions.

Strategic Café

Pause (10:30 to 11:00)

Presentation of the new governance model (11:00 to 12:30)

Unfortunately, this part is confidential

Lunch (12:30 to 1:15)

Strategic Café

World Café – Improvement to the well-being of people (1:15 to 3:00)

Background: In 1 year from now, what will be the impact of our organization on the following 4 sectors: employees, existing customers, stakeholders, and potential customers?

Question: What programs should we develop to meet our objective of improving people’s well-being?

4 Tables: Employees, Existing Customers, Potential Customers, and Society.

Mechanics: The participants are allowed 20 minutes at each table.

At the end of the exercise: Participants were asked to select the top 4 priorities for each of the sectors and write them on a master flip-chart. Participants were then asked to vote to select the top 4 priorities overall on which the organization would invest time, energy and resources to move forward.

Strategic Café

Pause (3:00 to 3:30)

Strategic Café

World Café – Selection criteria to prioritize our initiatives for the next 6 months (3:30 to 5:15)

Background: Given the limited resources and the large number of initiatives within our organization, which criteria do we want to use to prioritize and select the initiative that we will move forward using the following areas: Financial, Customer experience, and Employee learning and growth?

Question: Which criteria we will use to determine our priorities?

3 Tables: Financial, Customer Experience, and Employee Learning and Growth

Mechanics: The participants were allowed 20 minutes at each table.

At the end of the exercise: Participants were asked to select the top 4 priorities for each of the sectors and write them on a master flip-chart. Participants were then asked to vote to select the top 4 priorities overall. Those would become the criteria used to prioritize our initiatives for the next 6 months.

Strategic Café

Dinner (6:00 to 8:30)

As an analogy to our Strategic Meeting, we had organized dinner at O’Noir.

I’ll be publishing Day 2 of our meeting shortly.

Posted in Collaboration and teamwork, community, Leadership, Strategy Tagged: agile management, Facilitation, Pyxis, Strategic Planning, Strategic Process, Strategy, world café

Facilitation Cards

Martin Proulx — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:49:06 +0000

After facilitating a few challenging meetings where people talk a lot and sometimes have parallel conversations, I’ve decided to use facilitation cards to maintain a certain flow and ensure we stick to the time boxes. Since people agreed that the meetings aren’t efficient but they wish to maintain a fun atmosphere I added a couple of fun cards. Below are the cards I use – feel free to borrow them.

Voting Cards

These are pretty self explanatory.

Agrees with the proposal

Does not agree with the proposal

does not go to vote or does not cast a ballot

Questions Cards

I use these cards to control the flow of conversations. Before participants can talk, they need to notify the group about their intend. This also helps the facilitator determine if further questions or additional information is required about the topic being discussed.

I have a question

The participant would like to ask a question.

I would like to add something

The participant would like to add information to the current conversation.

I have a different topic

The participant wants to raise a different topic than the one currently being discussed.

Behavior Cards

A fun way for people to comply to the rules of the meeting. Inspired by penalty cards used in many sports.

Yellow Card

“it most commonly indicates a caution given to a player regarding his or her conduct” – wikipedia

Red Card

“it most commonly indicates a serious offence and often results in a player being permanently suspended from the game” – wikipedia

Do you use facilitation cards? Do you tricks you can share with others?

Posted in Tools Tagged: Facilitation

A few simple rules to make meeting more efficient

Martin Proulx — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:19:58 +0000

participants need to respect the time box allocated to them for speaking;
there can only be one active discussion at any time;
electronic gadgets must be turned off should not be visible during the meeting;
the facilitator and the participants must be prepared before the meeting;
participants must arrive on time and cannot leave the meeting before the end;
guests can not enter the meeting or leave the meeting between breaks;
all participants must raise their hand before speaking;
discussions and debates are encouraged;
the language must always be respectful and there should never be personal attack during discussions;
once a decision is made, it needs to be supported by all participants.

Do you use simple rules for your meetings? Share them here…

Posted in Management Tagged: Facilitation, meetings, rules