Strategic Planning Accelerator Day
Design the process before you write the plan.
Most strategic planning efforts fail at the process, not the content. This day helps your leadership team step back before diving into goals and initiatives: envisioning where the organization is headed, understanding what a genuinely useful strategic plan includes and why, and making the concrete decisions (stakeholders, timeline, structure) that will determine whether the plan you eventually write actually gets used.
Who this is for
This day is built for leadership teams preparing to launch or relaunch a strategic planning process, at any organizational size. It works whether your organization has never run a formal strategic plan before or has run several and wants this one to land differently. Because the day focuses on designing the process rather than producing a finished plan, it fits any leadership team size, from a small nonprofit executive team to a large division within a university or corporation.
Any level of experience works. We meet your team where it is, whether this is your first formal strategic plan or you've run several and want this one to land differently.
What will we walk away with?
A completed visioning exercise capturing your leadership team's shared perspective on where the organization is headed.
A clear understanding of the components a strategic plan should include, with your team's own rationale for what belongs in yours and what doesn't.
A designed planning process: who needs to be involved, what the timeline looks like, and what key decisions still need to be made before drafting begins.
A shared vocabulary across your leadership team for talking about strategy, so the plan that eventually gets written reflects genuine alignment rather than one person's draft.
Session structure
The day opens with a visioning session built around a diverge-converge structure: each leader reflects individually first, then works in small groups to synthesize ideas, then brings those ideas to the full team for discussion. This staged approach exists for a reason. When a group moves straight to open discussion, the loudest or most senior voices tend to shape the conversation before quieter perspectives get a fair hearing.
From there, the morning moves into the anatomy of a strategic plan itself. Rather than handing your team a template, we walk through the components a plan can include and ask your leadership team to decide, with real rationale, what belongs in yours.
The afternoon turns to the process itself: who should be at the table as the plan gets built, what a realistic timeline looks like, and what decisions need to be made before drafting starts. This is the part most strategic planning efforts skip, and it's usually the part that determines whether the eventual plan gets implemented or shelved.
What's unique about our approach?
We use a facilitation structure called a design charrette for the visioning portion of this day: a materials-rich, staged process where your team moves from individual sketching and reflection through small group synthesis into full group discussion. It's the same structure architecture and urban planning firms use for visioning work that needs to hold many perspectives without losing any of them along the way, and it produces a genuinely different quality of thinking than a straightforward group discussion does.
Where it fits the day, we bring in LEGO® Serious Play® methodology as part of the visioning work, giving your team a physical, tactile way to build and share what the organization's future should look like. Building something with your hands surfaces priorities and tensions that talking alone often doesn't reach, particularly for less linguistically dominant thinkers in the room who might otherwise stay quiet in a purely verbal discussion.
Design charrettes and human-centered design come from the same instinct: understanding gets built by working directly with the people who'll actually use what comes out of the room, not by designing in the abstract and hoping it fits once it's handed over.
This reflects something we care about across every Accelerator Day: the format of a learning experience shapes what people actually take from it. A visioning conversation that only happens verbally produces a different, and usually thinner, result than one that also happens on paper, on a wall, or in a physical model.
- Design charrettes
- Human-centered design
- Structured diverge-converge facilitation
- Simulation and scenario-based practice
FAQ
Do we need a strategic plan already in progress to book this day?
No. This day is designed to happen before drafting begins, whether your organization is starting a strategic plan from scratch or preparing to relaunch an existing planning effort.
Will we leave with a finished strategic plan?
No, and that's intentional. This day produces a visioning exercise, a shared understanding of what your plan should include, and a designed process for building it. Writing the plan itself is separate work that follows this day. Think of this Accelerator Day as a launch to your larger strategic planning process.
How many people should attend?
Strategic Planning works for leadership teams of any size. What matters more than headcount is that the right decision-makers and perspectives are in the room, since the day's outcomes depend on genuine leadership alignment.
Does this replace a full strategic planning engagement?
Not necessarily. Many organizations use this day as the starting point for a longer strategic planning partnership. Others use it as a standalone reset when an existing planning process has stalled. We can help you figure out which one fits during a consultation.
Is LEGO® Serious Play® required for this session?
No, it's incorporated where it fits the day's goals and your team's preferences. We'll talk through the right format during booking.
What impacts the pricing of a Strategic Planning Accelerator Day?
For Strategic Planning Accelerator Days specifically, you have the option to keep your LEGO® bricks and models at cost. Individual window kit bags are $15 per participant; shared model boxes start at $100 per table. Your group can opt to use and return our LEGO® components instead for no additional charge. There is also a cost per participant for materials, such as worksheets, folders, and other activities we’ll provide. Thus, an Accelerator Day with 100 participants will have a higher cost than an Accelerator Day with 10 participants.
Ready to book?
Tell us what your team needs, book the consultation, and we’ll get started on planning a customized Accelerator Day for your organization.
Related Accelerator Days
A strategic plan doesn't implement itself. Once your process is designed, these related days can help carry the plan forward.
