THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
The problem with most strategy offsites is we try to jam too much into one or two days.
At Mayflower, we've been running strategy offsites annually for about six or seven years, and I have to say the one last week was the best we've ever done, by a long way.
The main reason for that is we didn't try to do too much. Of course, initially we had way too many sessions planned, but in the end we really only discussed a couple of areas.
We really got to do them deeply and everyone participated. It was a much better use of our time than skimming over a bunch of different topics.
For everything else that was originally on our one-day agenda, we ran a series of workshops/meetings with smaller groups of people across the rest of the week.
That gave us a lot more thinking space around each meeting, and it also meant that people didn't have to sit through sessions that weren't relevant to them. Winning.
