A strategy workshop facilitator is an independent person who designs and chairs a leadership team's planning session, so everyone can take part and it ends in decisions with owners and dates.
We chair your planning day so the whole leadership team can be in the argument, instead of one of you running the room. Serious planning, with silly props.
Annual planning days, SLT and board away days, leadership offsites and retreats, and 2027 planning workshops.
The detail depends on what you define as success before the day. What's certain is that your team leaves with:
Opens a multi-day retreat
Four hours with Collette Easton and Matt Roberts: two 2-hour sessions with lunch in the middle. Inflatable unicorns, sacks of gold and a car dealer's coat, in service of a plan your team believes in. You run the days after, or bring us back.
Gather insights and prepare to plan
Private conversations with your attendees, your customers or the customers you want, so the day starts with what people think.
A full day
We design it with you, run it and debrief with you, along with any follow-on activities.
Two days or more
Diagnosis, choices, goals and the operating rhythm that carries them, chaired from start to finish.
What we do that is hard to do from inside your own team.
One-to-ones, pre-work and the data, ready before anyone sits down.
Frameworks proven in hundreds of sessions, fitted to what you need to decide.
Timing, pace and the recovery moves when a conversation stalls.
No budget to protect, so we can challenge anyone, including the CEO.
The things people keep circling back to, which are hard to see from inside the team.
Who has gone quiet, who is holding back, and when to push or pause.
Support for the people who own the next steps, so momentum carries.
Because we do this a lot, we change the plan when the room needs it.
Whoever's in the room, every session we run meets the same standard.
More than 500 workshops facilitated, by people who have built, run and sold companies. Collette Easton is an Association for Coaching accredited executive coach.
Before we design anything, we agree with the sponsor what the session has to achieve, and build every part of it around that.
Matt Roberts has been a founder, CEO, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Product Officer, and began his career in ad agencies. He has worked across every function, so he speaks your team's language and nothing slows down.
We talk to attendees beforehand, and chair the room so the most senior voice never sets the frame.
Decisions, owners and dates are captured as they happen, and the follow-ups are agreed before anyone leaves.
We don't teach theory. Your team learns these by planning its real year, with us alongside.
Put a rough value on each option before anyone argues for it, so the debate is about evidence, not volume.
Turn the discussion into a short written strategy the whole room recognises and can explain.
Write goals that will move you forward faster, educate the reader, and inspire the team pursuing them.
Match people, skills, team structures, leads and money to the few goals that matter most, so progress comes faster.
Every silly thing in the room has a serious job. This is the research it rests on.
In 54 real team meetings, humour followed by laughter predicted how well teams performed, straight afterwards and again two years later.
of 106 C-suite executives agreed their organisations were bad at diagnosing problems. Creative answers usually come from redefining the problem first.
of groups picked the best option when the key facts were spread across people, against 83% when everyone had the full picture. One-to-ones bring the hidden facts out.
Source: Stasser and Titus, 1985, reported in Schulz-Hardt et al.
People who watched a comedy solved more puzzles through sudden insight than people shown a scary film or a lecture.
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.
"This is the most fun planning I have ever had. Every SLT needs to do this."
Because the person chairing can't also argue for their own view. We have no budget to protect, so we can challenge the CEO's favourite idea when it needs it, and everyone else gets to take part properly.
A consultant brings the answer. We bring the process that gets your team to its own answer, and the experience to know when that answer is weak.
We quote after a 30-minute call, once we know the size of the group, how long you have and what you need decided by the end.
No. We work with OKRs, V2MOM, Rocks, SMART goals and hybrids of them. The method fits your organisation, not the other way round.
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.
Strategy days in London, Manchester and Birmingham.
Last updated
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.