Imagine producing a strategy retreat that generates breakthroughs and brings your team closer together than before

…without wasting time floundering as you figure out the best way to proceed.

All you need is the kind of assistance that helps you at each step of your way to do your best work as team.

I imagine that you are a leader in a Caribbean company who realizes that because of COVID, strategic planning has become more important than ever before. But your company may never have sat down to create a breakthrough strategy – the kind that COVID has made possible because so much has changed in such a short time.

You may realize that several doors of opportunity are now open that never existed in your industry, and your company needs to make the most of them. However, it’s not easy to craft a plan which has high-quality input, involves smart people and produces brand new thinking that takes your company to the next level.

Let me introduce you to the process I have used in client companies of all sizes for the past two decades to develop breakthrough strategic plans – the kind that transform companies and industries. These plans engage staff with their plausibility and audacity, producing products and services that excite customers. Oftentimes, they come to fruition right under the noses of competitors, who don’t notice what is happening until it’s too late.

The LeapOut Strategy System is a simple 4-step retreat planning system complete with a custom process, methods for engaging staff and unique ways of implementing the plan. These help you craft and implement a breakthrough strategy that fits your organization’s culture, has amazing ideas and engages your staff – no need to “wing it” or being in experts to do your thinking for you.

Click here to read a few testimonials.

Your employees, board or managers are murmuring – they believe that your leadership doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in the next few years. They may be spooked by an advanced technology, a change in customer behavior, the entry of a new competitor or an unexpected drop in revenue.

DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

But you’re unsure how to craft a truly gamechanging strategy – one that will vault your company out of whatever familiar rut it may be in that has worked in the past, but probably won’t succeed in the future.

You hate the idea of paying for an outside consultant who doesn’t know your business to come tell you what your strategy should be, but sometimes it seems like that’s the only way to get the new ideas you really need to thrive. (Spoiler alert: it’s not.)

When it comes to crafting a breakthrough strategy, any unease you have around being a great leader is amplified by feedback you may have received: “You’re a good manager but…not a great leader.” Or maybe you are just a bit tired of putting together strategies that others don’t implement…apart from paying lip-service.

And the idea of handing this important assignment to an articulate staff member who is good at “winging it” doesn’t seem as if it will work.

LET’S FLIP THE SCRIPT

You don’t need to have perfect staff members with McKinsey experience, Ivy League MBA’s, or the perfect process to effectively sponsor a breakthrough strategic plan.

And, you can get where you want without spending a fortune on consulting fees.

What matters when crafting the process required to produce a breakthrough strategic plan is not your qualifications, background or budget.

It all comes down to engaging your staff in a structured way and allows their best ideas to rise to the top.

How would your business transform if you could confidently produce a breakthrough strategy that takes the best possible ideas and engages your staff at the same time?

You shouldn’t have to spend a fortune to get outsiders’ ideas that may not work inside or beg your staff to implement the strategic plan from top down.

And you shouldn’t have to struggle on your own trying to come up with a planning process that gives you everything you want.

And now you don’t have to!

Introducing… The LeapOut Strategic Planning System

The NEW way of conducting strategic planning retreats that engages your people and surfaces the best ideas, so you can produce a breakthrough plan that actually gets implemented.

Whether you’re putting together your first or 20th retreat, whether you are a solopreneur or a Fortune 50 Executive, the LeapOut Strategic Planning System will transform the way you plan your retreats once and for ever.

Inside LeapOut you’ll follow the multi-step APED method to craft a high-impact, breakthrough strategic plan that includes your staff at all levels.

1. Assign
   Assign staff and other stakeholders within and outside the company to critical roles according to your budget
2. Prepare
   Prepare the agenda for the retreat by using both fixed and flexible design principles (We’ll show you how.)
3. Execute
   Execute the breakthrough retreat
4. Deploy
   Deploy projects and set up a reporting and accountability structure.

Click here to read a few testimonials.

Take a look at some of the things that we do which are different.

1: LeapOut Engagement Tools

Never kick off your planning effort trying to do too much (or too little) with too many people! Use our templates to decide who should be involved at which stage, according to the limits of your budget. You’ll understand why you need to prioritize the inclusion of different stakeholders and consider the cost/benefit of each activity. You’ll achieve an optimal balance of staff engagements for your efforts with this planning tool, never wasting a single dollar.

2: LeapOut Retreat Design

The key to conducting a great retreat is using great design principles and paying attention to details before the event starts. We’ll help you make the tradeoffs you need to make in your choice of location, duration, agenda, attendance and other elements. Once again, your budget will come into play as you decide how to design your event so that it produces breakthroughs so that participants walk away feeling they created. Leave behind the days of people sitting in retreats, bored, longing to return to their “real” work.

3: LeapOut Facilitation

A retreat is a dynamic activity in which the unexpected always occurs. We’ll manage the discussion so that your team can navigate these surprises and still arrive at the intended destination. Our team has seen all kinds of shocks and navigated them all.

4: LeapOut Principles

We use unique principles, some of which have made their way into Gleaner columns written by Francis Wade over the past decade. (Some are available here.) They originate in several disciplines and help you challenge your team to think outside the box.

For example, we conduct an interwoven short/ long-term planning exercise which helps you think in terms of Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG’s.) It produces credible, but inspiring goals which give your entire staff a sense of daily direction. That’s why we’ll challenge you to look 15-30 years out and translate your final vision into numbers.

Also, we believe that any team can produce an inspiring vision which includes all the right elements. As long as it’s designed following the right principles, it can’t fail to excite.

Hi, I’m Francis Wade and I’m the founder of Framework Consulting and the creator of the LeapOut Strategic Planning System. I’m also a business columnist in the Jamaica Sunday Gleaner’s Business Section, and I’ve written hundreds of columns on topics related to strategy and productivity such as the one below.

In a number of newspapers, I have laid out many of the secrets we use in the LeapOut Strategic Planning System. It’s possible to read them all and get a some great shortcuts.

Or, you could interview past clients and reverse-engineer what we do, and how we do it. But these aren’t realistic options. But why do I share these insider secrets with the public?

After working with a number of companies across the Caribbean I noticed a disconnect between the thinking of executives and their employees. I asked “Why?” and determined that it has its roots in the way strategic plans were developed in the region. As I found ways to fix them, the LeapOut approach was developed, inspired by the work of Robert Kaplan and David Norton, creators of the balanced scorecard and strategy maps.

I found that executives didn’t need to be told what their strategies should be…they just needed assistance in coming up with their best thinking.

This is part of the reason I was hired by McKinsey & Co to work with their clients and consultants. It’s different from the work they do, and more suited to a Caribbean audience which must craft its own answers due to cultural differences.

As a Cornell-trained engineer, I understood the limitations of a logical, analytic approach that wasn’t balanced with the human side: communication and motivation. This is why our retreats include a trained counsellor (Dale Pilgrim-Wade) to help you accomplish more than a logial outcome, but also one that helps your team implement the final, game changing result.

From our team’s experience, the LeapOut Strategic Planning Systme is right for you if…

• You work in a company which has talked about doing things differently starting as a matter of urgent i.e. a breakthrough is desired.

• Your role is to help sponsor, arrange or organize the next strategic planning retreat

• It’s important to bring everyone who attends on the same page.

• Getting staff buy-in to the plan is critical.

• You’re not happy merely repeating what was done in prior years, or in a different company.

Finally, you may be wondering…

Do I really NEED a breakthrough strategy? Is anyone even going to implement it once the plan is done?

I get it. I get asked this question all the time.

The truth is that no-one can predict which part of your strategic plan is going to be the most useful in the months to come. Why? Our environment is one of continuous flux, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic which seemed to come out of nowhere.

But there’s a big difference between facing a crisis with a plan vs. “winging it” without one.

My clients tell me that more has changed since COVID-19 started spreading globally, than has changed in two decades prior. Thankfully, they anticipated these shifts: their 20-year plans I helped them develop have become 5-year plans. While the timeframe has been shortened, they already knew where they wanted to go.

In our process, you’ll learn the outstanding value of having a detailed long-term plan and how to craft one quickly. In other words, it will have rehearsed several scenarios in a potentially difficult conversation which prepares it for any number of disruptions.

The back-casting you do will ensure that you have thought through the details of what your company must do in each year to get to its destination. This helps you succeed.

FAQ’s