Facilitating a Collaborative Strategic Planning Session

with Jamie Champagne

Cheat Sheet for the Facilitator

Step 1: Who are your stakeholders?
Action: Identify all the users, consumers, suppliers, participants, customers, partners, and
more who are involved with your area of work.
Consider:

• Who do you work with?

• Who do you need things from?
• Who needs things from you?
• Where do you get your supplies from?
• Who are your customers?
• Who are their (customers) partners?
• Who do you regularly engage with?
• Who haven’t you worked with lately but have been wanting to?
• Who do you need to work with? Or reach out to?

Step 2: What are you doing well?

Action: Brainstorm all the successes and accomplishments you and your team have achieved.
Consider:

• What did you accomplish?

• What worked well?
• Who worked well?
• Did you apply lessons learned?
• Did any partnerships work great?
• Did you try something new?

Step 3: What are the challenges?

Action: Knowing what is working well, start thinking about what is not working well.
Consider:

• What is not working well?

• Where did you not accomplish our goals?

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 • Was there anything not finished?
• Did any relationships fall through?
• Are there any aspects requiring training, experience, or expertise?

Step 4: Group the challenges.

Action: Collate the challenges in groupings of certain type.
Consider:

• What are the similarities between challenges?

• Which ones are around the same stakeholders? Topic?
• Are there similar types of challenges? Or repeated ones?
• Any grouping of types of outcomes?

Step 5: Name your challenges.

Action: For each grouping of challenges, define what the challenge is.
Consider:

• What do you call the grouping?

• What type of challenge is happening?
• Is there something not working?
• Is there something missing?
• Is there someone not present?
• What changes have occurred?
• What could be lacking?

Step 6: Define the focal problem.

Action: Determine all the challenges and identify the central issue you are facing.
Consider:

• For each challenge, ask if it’s a cause and effect

• Ask “if this, then what” with your challenge to help you decide
• The item that is not a cause or an effect, or feels like it could be both, is your
central challenge
Create your problem tree:
• Because we have [causes]
• We have a [focal problem]. which
• Creates [effects]

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Step 7: Turn challenges into opportunities.
Action: Focus your efforts on the opportunities that present themselves.
Consider:

• If we have outputs, we can have purpose.

• If we have purpose, we can have goals in place.
• Outputs drive purpose to achieve goals.
Create your objective tree:

• Your focal problem is your purpose

• Your causes are outputs
• And your effects are goals

Step 8: Define your objectives.

Action: For each item on your objective tree, define the objective.
Consider:

• Define what the objectives mean

• Identify indicators of how you can prove the objective is being met
• Brainstorm all assumptions
• List any data sources to verify assumptions

Step 9: Turn objectives into action plans.

Action: Assign leads and work the objectives as individual projects.
Consider:

• Determine a lead for each objective

• The objective defines the project goals/charter
• Assumptions become your risk
• Indicators can help you break out the work into manageable pieces

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