The best strategy workshop exercises turn discussion into decisions: a pre-mortem finds what could kill the plan, a confidence vote tests real agreement, and canvases give the whole room one shared picture.
These are three of the exercises we use most with leadership teams, explained properly, so you can run them yourself. Each one has a serious job, even when the room is laughing.
For strategy days, planning workshops, leadership offsites and retreats.
Exercise 1
Imagine it is a year from now and the plan has failed. What killed it? It makes it safe to be critical, and the plan gets stronger for it.
Imagining an event has already happened makes people far better at explaining why. Gary Klein popularised the pre-mortem for project teams, building on research into prospective hindsight. It also gives quieter people permission to voice doubts they would otherwise keep to themselves.
Source: Klein, Harvard Business Review, 2007. More in our guide to the pre-mortem.
Exercise 2
Before a decision goes on the wall, everyone shows one to five fingers at the same time. A room of threes is not agreement.
Silence is often read as agreement. Voting at the same moment stops people following the most senior person, and asking the twos turns quiet doubt into something the team can fix before it leaves the room.
Exercise 3
Large-format visuals that give a messy question a shape everyone can see, argue with and add to. Stickies go on, move around and come off, so the thinking is captured as it happens rather than lost on a flipchart.
We use many canvases and visual frameworks, chosen for the work your team needs to do. Here are three examples.
How sure are we, really? Each idea goes where its strongest evidence sits today, from "I believe it" to "We were right". Then the team finds the fastest, cheapest way to test it, and agrees up front what would change its mind. Adapted from Itamar Gilad's Confidence Meter. See also confidence assessment.
Click to enlargeFrom ambition to action: the objective, why it matters, the metrics you want to move, and the work that will move them, split into initiatives, experiments and process commitments.
Click to enlargeMaking it happen: the skills it takes, who you need and when over twelve weeks, and what is in the way, with early warning signs and a plan for each.
Click to enlargeFrom the many exercises we choose between.
Everyone writes their ideas silently before anyone speaks, so the most senior voice doesn't set the frame.
Think alone, then in pairs, then fours, then the whole room. Every voice is in within minutes. From Liberating Structures.
List every way to guarantee you miss your targets, then spot what you already do that looks like it. Based on TRIZ, from Liberating Structures.
Strategy consultant, co-founder of ZOKRI
Executive coach
The ZOKRI team has worked with Legal & General, Absa, SAP, Microsoft, Sage, Chargebee, Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce, News UK, ITV, ASOS and Virgin Atlantic.
A pre-mortem asks the team to imagine the plan has already failed and list the reasons why. It surfaces risks people would otherwise keep quiet about, while there is still time to fix them.
Everyone shows one to five fingers on a decision at the same time. Anyone at two or below says what would move them to a four, so quiet doubt gets heard before the decision is final.
Yes, and this page is written so you can. A facilitator helps most when the stakes are high, the CEO has a strong view, or the team has been avoiding a conversation.
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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.