Away day facilitator in Manchester, with activities that end in decisions.
Our away day facilitators work across Manchester and the North West. We design the day's activities and chair the discussion, so the whole leadership team can take part and the day ends in decisions.
The venue's booked. Now the day needs filling with something your leadership team will take part in and still talk about. We bring the activities, the props and a neutral chair, and the day ends in decisions. We work at venues across the city centre, Salford Quays and Cheshire, or at the one you've already booked.
Full-day and multi-day formats, run at the venue you've already booked in Manchester.
Meet Matt before you book
The person you'd be talking to, and how we think.
Who we work with
Senior leadership teams of companies of every size.
Size
Most are 20 to 200 employees, and larger companies are easily supported.
Group
From a single leadership team to large groups working across multiple breakout rooms.
Stage
- Start-ups
- Scale-ups
- Transformations
- Turnarounds
Away day activities that do real work
Pre-mortem
"It's a year from now and this plan failed. What killed it?" People find it easier to be critical this way, and the plan gets stronger for it.
Write first
Everyone writes their ideas silently before anyone speaks, so the most senior voice doesn't set the frame.
1-2-4-All
Think alone, then in pairs, then fours, then the whole room. Every voice is in within minutes.
Stop-doing
Design the perfect way to miss your targets, then spot what you already do that looks like it.
Confidence vote
Everyone shows one to five fingers on each decision. A room of threes isn't agreement, so we ask the twos what would move them.
Plus the games from our sessions, which make more sense on a call: Unicorns love Rainbows, Becoming a Time Lord, Strategy Bingo, and It's a deal, it's a steal.
How long should it be?
A full day gives you time to agree where you really are before deciding anything, which is usually the part that's missing. For annual planning or a strategy reset, take two days or more.
Getting the most from your venue
Daylight, walls you can stick paper to, space to break into groups of four, and lunch in a different room so people get up and move. A U-shaped table looks smart and kills conversation.
Away day venues and evening plans in Manchester
An away day should feel like a change of scene without being a novelty. These Manchester venues have character and the basics we look for, and the evening ideas below give the team something to do together that isn't another drink at the bar.
The John Rylands Library
Deansgate · Characterful space
A Victorian Gothic library with event spaces. Memorable for a board day.
Hallé St Peter's
Ancoats · Characterful space
A restored church that's now the Hallé's rehearsal space, in the middle of Ancoats' restaurants.
The Lowry
Salford Quays · Characterful space
An arts centre on the water with conference rooms and plenty of daylight, by MediaCity.
Rookery Hall
Nantwich, Cheshire · Country house within an hour
A country house that offers exclusive use for senior teams, with 38 acres for breakouts when the weather's kind.
De Vere Cranage Estate
Cranage, Cheshire · Country house within an hour
A rural retreat with 28 meeting spaces and grounds for breakouts, within reach of Manchester Airport.
Evening plans in Manchester
Flight Club
City centre
Social darts with automatic scoring.
Junkyard Golf Club
City centre
Crazy golf built from salvaged junk. Daft in the right way.
Lane7
City centre
Bowling, ping pong and karaoke rooms under one roof.
Roxy Ball Room
Arndale
Pool, shuffleboard and duck pin bowling, with bookable group areas.
NQ64
Northern Quarter
A retro arcade bar. Surprisingly good at levelling a room.
Piccadilly and Oxford Road stations cover most of the city centre venues on this list. Manchester Science Park and the Manchester Technology Centre sit on the Oxford Road corridor. Rookery Hall is about 10 minutes from Crewe, which is on the London Euston line.
All our Manchester venue, restaurant and evening ideas
Venues researched October 2026. We don't take commission, and listing a venue doesn't mean we've run a session there. Check availability direct.
Before you plan: the planning baseline
Agree where you're starting from.
Planning events get swallowed by circular, opinion-based debate. 10 to 15 confidential discovery calls, up to 90 minutes each, give your team a starting point everyone accepts.
Without it
Days of circular debate
Opinions and the loudest voice shape the diagnosis.
With a planning baseline
A starting point everyone accepts
Themes, testable beliefs and the root causes behind them.
We'd recommend no serious planning starts without it.
Watch Matt Roberts
Plan with AI and people, and get a plan that's yours
AI can produce a good, plausible plan in hours. But it hasn't spoken to your customers or your teams, and it won't have an original idea. The magic is bringing both together, so the plan is brilliant and uniquely yours.
After the plan
The plan is agreed. Now someone has to find the time.
10 of 15recent discovery interviews
Leadership teams know what needs fixing.
- They can name the broken process and the meeting that goes nowhere.
- What they can't find is the time to fix it.
- Some aren't sure they have the skills.
- In 10 of our last 15 interviews, someone said it almost word for word.
- Output under pressure
- Work harder
- No time to improve
- Capability erodes
- More fires
MIT's John Sterman and Nelson Repenning call it the capability trap.
- Under pressure, the sensible short-term move is to work harder.
- That leaves no time to improve the way work gets done.
- Capability erodes, the fires multiply, and firefighting starts to feel like diligence.
Source: Repenning and Sterman, California Management Review, 2001
It's hard to see from the inside.
- Managers see their own patch, but most plans fail at the handoffs between teams.
- In a study of nearly 8,000 managers, 84% could rely on their boss and their own team. Only 9% could always rely on colleagues in other functions.
- Naming the problem is political, because it usually points at a peer or a past decision.
- Most managers were promoted for doing the work, not for designing how it flows.
Source: Sull, Homkes and Sull, Harvard Business Review, 2015
- With youCoachingReviews
So we stay, then step back.
- At first we run the work alongside your people: mapping the process, testing a fix, measuring it and running the retrospective.
- Then your managers run the next cycle while we coach from the side.
- Then we step back to the quarterly review.
- Your people learn by doing the work with us, which sticks in a way a training day never does.
- We'd rather you stopped needing us by spring.
- People
- Operations
- Sales and marketing
- AI enablement
Fractional, until the role is hired or grown
Sometimes the gap is a missing person, not a missing skill.
- The plan needs someone to lead the people side, run operations, drive sales and marketing, or get AI working in the business.
- Hiring for that takes six months you don't have.
- One of us joins your team part-time, works from inside with your people and systems, and hands the role over when you've hired or grown someone into it.
Weekly check-in
Goal 2Your owner + oursProgressConfidence3 of 5We're your accountability partners.
- People find it harder to let a goal slide when someone outside the business turns up every week expecting to see it moved.
- A quarterly cadence, with a named owner on your side and one on ours for every goal.
- Weekly check-ins on progress and confidence, so a slipping goal shows up in week three rather than week twelve.
- What we learn, including what didn't work, is written down and shared across the team.
- We're measured on one thing, and it's results.
- Planning30 daysCarry on
Every engagement ends with a 30-day review and an option to carry on.
- However we run your planning, from a single in-person day to several weeks of interviews, async work, online sessions and workshops.
- The option is priced before we start, so nobody has to negotiate when energy is low.
- Most teams know by day 30 whether they want it.
Your framework, or our recommendation
We can follow your preferred methodology, or recommend one that fits.
- Strategy one-pagers
- Balanced scorecard
- Strategy maps
- OKRs
- Playing to Win
- V2MOM
- No named framework
The framework matters less than you'd think. What makes a strategy great is universal: finding your route to being different, with an advantage you can sustain.
Strategy
Where you'll be different
Your route to being unique, and the advantage that makes it last.
Operational excellence
Running better, every day
Getting better at what you do, and solving the problems holding you back now.
The two need to co-exist. A strategy doesn't stop the pursuit of operational excellence, and operational excellence on its own isn't a strategy.
Why bring in a facilitator
Some things are hard to do from the inside.
Biases
InsideConfirmation, sunk cost, optimism: we back what we already believe and what we've already paid for.
With usWe name the bias and test the evidence.
Agendas
InsideBudgets, teams, pet projects: everyone argues for something they own, so the plan bends towards the loudest interest.
With usNothing to protect, so we can challenge anyone.
Hierarchy
InsideAnchoring, deference, groupthink: once the most senior person speaks, the room quietly lines up behind them.
With usEvery voice heard before the boss speaks.
Focus
InsideRunning the agenda, the clock and the debate: whoever chairs from inside loses their own voice in the argument.
With usWe run the room. You take part.
Experience
InsideOnce a year, by people who do it once a year: nobody has a feel for when to push, pause or change the plan.
With usWe do this all the time, and adapt on the day.
Too close
InsideHabit, assumptions, the curse of knowledge: familiar problems stop looking like problems, and nobody asks why.
With usFresh eyes and better questions.
Questions people ask first
Can you work with the venue we've already booked?
Yes. Tell us the room and we'll plan around it. The things that matter most are daylight, wall space for paper and room to break into groups of four.
What makes a good away day activity for senior leaders?
It does real work. A pre-mortem on next year's plan, silent idea-writing before discussion, and games that reframe the conversations people avoid. If an activity doesn't feed a decision, cut it.
Where we work
We run planning days and away days across the UK, Europe and the US, in person or online. These are the cities we're asked about most.
Away days elsewhere: London and Birmingham.
Also in Manchester: strategy days, ai strategy workshops and venues, dinner and evening ideas.
Related
Last updated
Tell us what has to be decided.
Thirty minutes with Matt Roberts. Tell us who'll be in the room and what you need by the end, and we'll tell you how we'd run it.