Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Going It Alone or Hiring a Facilitator

In an age of facilitators, organizational leaders, and planners for everything under the sun, hiring a helper doesn't come cheap. You need to consider three costs to your company for strategic planning:

• The value of your participants' time — more precious than ever in this time-starved world
• The cost of any facility rental, AV equipment, travel, food, and lodging
• The opportunity cost if, following your meeting, plans and decisions aren't carried out or your team's behavior doesn't change for the better

Add up these actual and figural costs, and you can easily see how strategic planning represents a real investment. One way to maximize your investment is to engage the services of a professional facilitator. Obviously, not every meeting calls for a facilitator, but your annual retreat can probably use one.

In the following sections, I show you how to run planning sessions yourself as well as how and when to hire a facilitator.

Running the planning sessions yourself

For any planning sessions that you choose to run yourself, be sure to follow these best practices: have a clear agenda, require participants to come prepared, start and end on time, and manage the conversation in the room.

To run strategic planning sessions, you want to gather a set of facilitation techniques for different parts of the process. Some of my favorite facilitation exercises and methods include the following sources:

• Best Practices for Facilitation: This source is the ...