CORE
September 2024
Orchestrating a productive planning workshop is a challenge for many executives. Ongoing execution, resource constraints, evolving priorities, and urgent crises all distract leaders from sitting down with their teams to strategize for next year, which is now only three months away.
Too often, the result is a cobbled-together, last-minute meeting that lacks thoughtful depth and structure to propel your organization toward preeminence. Plus, if you are running the meeting, you are sidelining one of the most strategic minds in the room − your own.
We have helped scores of Arketi clients build and host planning workshops that accelerate their team’s growth and execution. Our approach combines logic and imagination to help them visualize their goals, plus the steps needed to achieve them.
From planning and prioritization to blue sky creativity and ideation, these workshops take many forms, but the result is the same: a carefully crafted experience that inspires and elevates next year’s strategy.
Which means it’s time to get ahead of the game with the the right kind of messaging, media materials, on-site logistics, and content needed to drive awareness and capture leads.
While your own approach will depend on a range of factors, there are various styles or flavors you can structure your workshop around. Here are a few we have found successful in generating stellar ideas and actionable plans.
Just remember, for you CMOs and other executive leaders out there… consider participating in rather than running your own workshop. Why sideline your own brainpower and creative thinking? Bring in a facilitator so you too can participate fully in the experience.
Here are five tried-and-true workshop approaches we frequently use:
Explore your organization’s mission and values with a critical eye toward activation. Ask your team: how can we bring our brand to life for audiences inside and out of our company? Then, jointly review communications imperatives to reinforce and refine what’s important and what isn’t. Along the way, bring in outside trending topics, tactics, and tools to encourage fresh, new thinking for the discussion.
Use an inside-out approach to match your team with guest speakers who will help you generate new ideas and insightful analysis. Conduct a road-mapping exercise that defines your marketing reality, what you control, what you can’t control, what you hope to achieve, and what needs to change so you can travel that road. Finally, get active and facilitate a process for your team to grab, group, and grow new ideas through collaborative discussion.
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Want to elevate your team’s creativity? You’ll first need to equip it with a crash course on brainstorming out-of-the-box blockbuster ideas. We often recommend “Hatch!” by Disney Imagineer C. McNair Wilson, but a variety of methodologies co-exist.
Conduct a group assessment to identify what you need to anticipate, fix, improve, innovate, and remove to achieve greatness as a company, team, and individual. With that knowledge, you can then put your creative methodology to the test and start bringing to life new, creative ideas for success.
Competitive reviews may not be the most exciting activity, but they can fuel high-value, energetic goal setting sessions. Make sure only the best ideas survive, and then, once the group has landed on a select few, get everyone on their feet to brainstorm supporting objectives. Afterward, break into small groups for gameplan construction and active prioritization.
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For teams that need to reconnect or simply re-engage, this approach jumpstarts the process. Start with an open discussion of the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Identify those key tactics that make your organization stand apart from the rest. Sometimes, advance skip-level interviews identify gaps and weak links. It’s best to have a third party do this type of qualitative research as it prompts true sharing and rich insights.
Those insights can then kickstart a team improvement plan, which may even lead to new organizational structures for the group. And with the hard work complete, your focus can shift back to the key tactics and how they map to individual contributors.
Your annual planning workshop is also an opportunity to address the mental load and overall wellness of your team. Engaging an internal or external people solutions partner can help you develop customized learning plans that build on individuals’ strengths and skills so they can achieve their full potential – not just as a team, but for themselves as well. Soft skills such as active listening, conflict resolution, leadership development, and time management can all be brought into the equation.
Don’t let end-of-year priorities prevent you and your team from strategizing for the upcoming year. Our world evolves rapidly, especially for us marketers and communicators. What works today may be ineffective tomorrow. Take the time to chart a course for 2025 and ensure your team is inspired to achieve marketing preeminence.
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