Retreats Aren’t Always About Change

Mid-year reviews don’t always need to result in a wave of change. Sure, sometimes planning retreats can result in completely readjusting your strategic trajectory – but this doesn’t always need to be the case.

Last week, we hosted our own mid-year review. We took our team offsite to look back at our performance against our outlined strategy. We quickly realized we weren’t going to make huge strategic shifts within our organization.

So you might be asking if you aren’t looking to make huge strategic shifts, why take the time to have a mid-year review? Here are four reasons we made the effort to have a mid-year review:

  1. To look at our performance – Take a look back at what’s working, what isn’t, and what you need to do to achieve your desired outcomes. After looking back at our performance data, we quickly saw we needed to make some adjustments to meet our year-end goals.
  2. To take a step back – Reconnecting the day-to-day to the larger strategic picture provides clarity to the “why are we doing this?” question.
  3. To brainstorm solutions – It’s not often you get to capture the full attention of your entire team, so it’s ok to use time in a mid-year review to brainstorm new ideas or solutions to organization-wide issues. Using your team’s unique perspectives can be pivotal to finding solutions to tough issues.
  4. To learn – Keep the retreat light by having a few team development exercises. It was refreshing to crack a few smiles while learning as a team a team.

The connotation that strategy reviews and retreats must always result in major organizational shifts is false. Rather, it’s an opportunity your team should seize to reconnect, breath, and march forward to achieve your organization’s vision.

One Comment

  1. Aleksey Savkin says:

    It’s good to see that strategy practitioners actually practicing what they are promoting! Keep doing!

    I can say that in our business explaining to BSC Designer customers the nuances about the software is much easier as we use it for our strategy needs too.

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