Elena Cruz had the dates, the venue, and a two-day draft agenda. Her leadership team would review performance, scan the market, revisit priorities, hear departmental presentations, and end with action planning. She sent the outline with the question many sponsors ask at this stage: What else should we add?
I will call the company Meridian Distribution. The names and identifying details in this example have been changed, but the design problem is real. Looking at the agenda, my first concern was not what was missing. It was that the workshop already looked full even though we had not yet named the strategic work that required these leaders to work on it together. If you are planning a strategy workshop, that is the question I would answer before adding another agenda block: What must move because these people are giving their time to this workshop?
The agenda usually arrives before the real question
Starting with the agenda is reasonable. Dates have to be protected, executives want to know how the day will run, and facilitators need enough structure to estimate time. Annual planning also has a memory. If the organization reviewed the vision, ran SWOT, and heard every department last year, removing those items can feel as though something important has been forgotten.
The risk appears when familiar activities quietly become the definition of a good workshop. A leadership team can finish every exercise, fill every template, and still avoid the decision that really needed collective attention. The day feels productive because activity is visible. The unresolved strategic work is harder to see, especially when everyone has contributed something to the final deck.
Find the work hiding underneath the agenda
When I begin designing a strategy session, I look for work that ordinary meetings, separate analyses, and email exchanges have not been able to move. A recurring disagreement is often a clue. So is a decision that keeps climbing to the same executive, a priority everyone supports until budgets are discussed, or an ambition that has survived several planning cycles without becoming a choice.
In Meridian’s case, the agenda said “strategic planning,” but the deeper issue was the sequence of the work. Department heads were expected to prepare their own plans before the leadership team had made the enterprise choices those plans were supposed to serve. By the time everyone entered the main session, each function would already have projects, targets, and budget requests it had invested in. The strategy workshop risked becoming a negotiation among prepared positions.
That diagnosis changed the design. Preparation became a way to bring evidence, observations, assumptions, and strategic questions into the process without asking departments to arrive with finished answers. The main strategy session became the place where leaders would make enterprise choices. Department planning came after that, as translation. A later leadership review would reconcile those departmental plans before resources were committed.
The calendar barely changed. The work inside it did.
Write a Movement Brief before you build the agenda
The first tool I would use with the sponsor is deliberately small. I call it the Movement Brief, an SLC tool for clarifying the work before designing the workshop. It uses three prompts: What important work is not moving now? Why does it require these people to work on it together? What movement would make the gathering worthwhile?
Complete the last prompt in plain language: “By the end of this work, we need to move ______ from ______ toward ______.” The wording does not need to be elegant; it needs to be useful. “Move from misalignment to alignment” is too soft. “Move from twelve competing priorities toward three strategic bets leadership is willing to protect when resources tighten” gives the workshop something it can work on.
Before turning the Movement Brief into an agenda, test it three ways. Is the work important enough that failure to move it has a real cost? Does it genuinely require these people together, or could it be handled through analysis, an executive decision, or a smaller working group? Could you later tell whether the work moved, even if the final business result takes months to appear?
These questions keep the brief from becoming another elegant sentence no one can use. They also reveal when the requested workshop is the wrong intervention. Sometimes the responsible recommendation is a shorter decision meeting, a piece of analysis, or several smaller working sessions rather than a two-day retreat.
Let movement decide what deserves workshop time
Only after the job becomes clearer do I return to the agenda. I do not automatically remove SWOT, market reviews, vision work, or departmental input. I ask what contribution each one is supposed to make to the movement.
If the workshop must choose where to concentrate, a market review may be useful because it brings evidence that could change the choice. If leaders disagree about why customer retention is falling, a shared diagnosis may deserve more time than another round of priority setting. If departments need to surface constraints, their input matters, but twenty-minute presentations may not be the best way to get it.
This is where a movement-first design often becomes shorter and harder at the same time. There are fewer activities to hide behind, and more of the workshop is spent on seeing, choosing, and dealing with consequences.
When the sponsor says every department still needs to present
In the Meridian design, departmental presentations were one of the items that could not simply be deleted. The sponsor had a legitimate concern: department heads needed to be heard, and senior management needed visibility into operating realities before making choices. Removing their contribution would have made the process weaker.
So the facilitation question became more precise. What did leadership actually need from the departments before it could decide? The answer was not a polished departmental strategy. It was selected evidence, constraints, customer and operating signals, assumptions, and questions that could inform enterprise choices.
That distinction created options. Some material could be prepared before the workshop. Department leaders could contribute concise signals rather than defend full plans. More workshop time could then be protected for cross-enterprise choices that no department could make on its own.
This is the kind of judgment a facilitator has to make. “Remove presentations” is not a principle, and neither is “give everyone equal airtime.” The better question is what contribution the workshop needs and what format gives that contribution without consuming the time required for strategic work.
Before the session begins, the sponsor and facilitator should be able to describe the movement in roughly the same language. The agenda should begin to change in response: some activities receive more time, some become prework, some are redesigned, and some disappear.
That is not proof that the strategy will succeed. It is proof of something nearer and useful: the workshop now has a real job, and its design is being judged by that job rather than by how much activity fits into the day.
Start here
Take the draft agenda for your next strategy workshop and set it aside for fifteen minutes. Sit with the sponsor and write one Movement Brief. Name the work that is not moving, explain why it requires this workshop, and describe the movement that would make the gathering worthwhile.
If you still cannot say what must move, do not improve the agenda yet. Keep working on the job. Once the movement is clear, Decide What the Workshop Must Produce turns it into a finish line the workshop can actually reach.