Beyond the Boardroom: Five Creative Leadership Retreat Strategies
This year, instead of the same old team retreat, why not give something new a try? Take a walk on the creative-side and embrace innovation, design, and collaboration across your team.
By pulling in design thinking tools and resources, you can build your own leadership skills as well as your team’s, all while learning from one another along the way.
We’ve got five innovative leadership retreat ideas that will get your team, Senior Leaders, and Board excited to come together .
1. Team Skill Sharing
Unlock more meaningful results and team cohesion by encouraging creative skills, creative thinking, and creative problem solving.
Read: The Importance of Creativity in the Workplace
Watch: Why do we need creativity?
Building a team of well-rounded, skilled professionals can only benefit your organization. Get your team thinking creatively by introducing new skills and improving on existing ones.
Utilize your team’s current strengths to build up everyone’s skills by encouraging folks to share their gifts. Chances are that most people on your team have a ‘hidden talent’— for example, someone who teaches improv, loves to paint, or is a trained yoga instructor—who would be excited to share their passion, skill or hobby.
You never know until you ask. Chances are they’d be more than willing, maybe even excited, to run a 1 or 2-hour workshop with the whole team.
2. Harness the Power of Human-Centred Design
Applying a human-centred design lens is a fundamentally different, empathy-driven approach to interacting with the world around us—an approach that anyone can adopt.
As an organizational strategy consulting firm, we use a number of human-centred design tools that you can easily adopt as part of your next retreat:
Read: Overlap’s 75 Design Thinking Tools and Resources to help you embrace design to reach better results as a team.
Retreat Activity Idea: Try working with Empathy Maps to better understand the needs of your colleagues, customers, or stakeholders. You can even complete an empathy map for yourself.
3. Use a Design Sprint to Solve a Specific Problem In One Day
What big problem could your organization solve together in one day? 2 days? 5 days?
Design sprints are often 5-day chunks of problem solving, but there’s a lot you can accomplish in just one day.
Overlap’s 5-Day Design Sprint Sample Schedule
A design sprint requires a set amount of time for team members to focus on one specific project, from 9-5pm, Monday-Friday. Your team can set aside whatever time you can spare to focus-in on one desired problem.
Possible prompts to help focus your day:
What reoccurring problem could you solve if you all put your minds together?
What one system could you improve if you dedicated a full-day of time and resources?
The key to a successful design sprint is in the prototyping and testing. Get to a prototype as soon as possible and test it in the best way you can. Gather feedback with this helpful grid for acquiring actionable feedback as soon as possible. If time allows, take that feedback and make necessary adjustments.
Case Study: Learn more about design sprints and the steps involved from Troy Wiatr at the Early Literacy Alliance of Waterloo Region.
4. Plan For the Future Using Foresight
Adapting to change is tough. Keeping up with today’s rapidly changing technological, social, economic, and political changes is even tougher.
Think about how much marketing has changed over the past ten years through social media or how many changes television networks have endured since the emergence of streaming platforms; not to mention the enormous work, school, healthcare and societal changes each of us experienced since the early days of pandemic in 2020.
It’s important to plan for the future of your organization and your industry.
Creating a Foresight Plan is a worthwhile process that can get your organization on the path that’s the most likely to lead to success.
Talking about the future can be a fun and interesting process for your team. It’s an extremely valuable activity that gets groups thinking about and planning for the possibilities of the future.
Retreat Activity Ideas:
Ask small groups to consider: What might the future look like 10 years from now? 20 years from now? 50 years from now? Learn more about How You Can Prepare for the Future Using Strategic Foresight
Try the ‘Three Horizons’ exercise: Working through three horizons will help your organization recognize uncertainty while becoming more capable of responding to future changes.
To start, you’ll draw three different horizons outlining your current state and your idealized future. You’ll then create a middle horizon by considering all of the things your organization would have to do to get from horizon one to horizon three.
Step 1: Create the first horizon (H1) by describing the current way of doing things. This is what you can expect if we all keep behaving in the same way.
Step 2: Next, you’ll jump to the third horizon (H3), which is all about the future. For the third horizon, describe a new system of existence including new ways of living and working as you envision it. These ideas and systems are beyond the reach of H1 and often seem unrealistic right now.
Step 3: Now you can draw out the second horizon (H2) which acts as a transition zone between H1 and H3. The second horizon captures any emerging innovations that respond to the what’s missing in H1, and it anticipates the possibilities of your future horizon: H3.
Learn more about the three horizons and working with change from Bill Sharpe in his Association of Professional Futurists article.
Note: This post outlines the very basics of creating a Foresight Plan, but working through even the beginning stages can get you and your team thinking beyond today and tomorrow. If you’re interested in diving deeper into Strategic Foresight, we’d be happy to support you and your organization.
5. Explore to Create
This one is simple—go exploring.
Get outside, go out into the world, and explore with your team.
Your adventure can be anything from a short walk to an activity or talk in a park.
Read: 11 Reasons You Should Go Outside from Business Insider
Let’s add in that going outside can improve happiness and it will make whatever activity or topic you’re focusing on more memorable.
Go a step further and add in some community culture with a trip to a local or nearby museum or art gallery. Worried it’s not on topic? That’s partially the goal.
Create a retreat like no other, and build a team that can communicate about more than what’s in the boardroom.
Looking for support planning or facilitating your next strategic retreat?
Overlap specializes in creating meaningful retreat experiences that blend strategy with creativity. Get in touch to learn more about strategic retreat packages and working with us.
