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

…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 strategic planning is important. The idea of planning for the future isn’t new to you and your colleagues.

However, you sense that a business-as-usual strategic plan will only yield mediocre results. You want more than just a placeholder plan, you want to engage in something transformational that brings people alive.

Deep inside, you yearn to create the kind of pre-emptive, game-changing strategy that changes everything.

The challenge is that your senior team has never been part of such a planning process. They are accustomed to the usual short-term thinking and planning that every business must engage in to stay viable. It’s characterized by emergencies, driven by immediate deadlines and takes up a lot of energy.

Unfortunately, it never gets to the root causes of nagging issues.

You also aren’t being pre-emptive, handling incipient threats from competitors, new technology and regulators. Even customer preferences are changing in record time, but your organization is slow to respond.

Before you know it, you fear, you could end up like Kodak, Blockbuster Video or Blackberry. Or disrupted like companies in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, Guyana and other parts of the region. Firms like Cable & Wireless were dominant in the region at one point (in mobile phone service), until their strategy fell apart.

If you see the value of a different approach, allow me to introduce you to the process we have used in 55 regional companies of all sizes for the past two decades.

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. See the six-minute video below.

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 pre-emptive, game-changing strategy that fits your organization’s culture, has amazing ideas and engages your staff – no need to “wing it” or bringing in outsiders to do your thinking for you.

Not sure if this approach fits your environment? Click here to read a few testimonials or view videos with CEOs sharing their results.

If you didn’t or can’t watch the above LeapOut video, keep reading…maybe you are in a tricky spot. Why?

Perhaps your employees, board or managers are murmuring – they believe that your leadership is being reactive, but not pre-emptive. They are becoming increasingly concerned by the advent of an advanced technology, a change in customer behavior, the entry of a new competitor or an unexpected drop in revenue.

Even if you aren’t in a for-profit corporation, your stakeholders are still concerned. They have seen government agencies shuttered, defunded or sidelined. Witnessed NGOs lose track of their mission because the environment changed. Followed charities which floundered when a few key leaders left, retired or migrated.

DOES ANY OF THE ABOVE SOUND FAMILIAR?

If it does, you may want to take your organization in a new direction.

But you’re unsure how to craft a truly pre-emptive, game-changing 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 land, and 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 fresh 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 the requisite 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 and Ivy League MBA’s to effectively sponsor a pre-emptive 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 pre-emptive, game-changing strategy that 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 small business owner 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 engages your staff at all levels.

1. Assign
   Assign supportive roles to staff and other stakeholders according to your strategic planning 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 with our help as facilitators.
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. As your facilitators, we take you through the following:

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 as facilitators 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 Jamaica Gleaner columns written by Francis Wade over the past decade. (Some are available here.)

For example, we facilitate an interwoven short/mid/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.

Furthermore, we also use strategic foresight tools – the ones preferred by futurists – to help you think about the future in terms of multiple outcomes. We use scenario planning, backcasting, and environmental scanning in the LeapOut process.

Finally, 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 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.

I’m on a mission to help organizations overcome their tendency to rely on run-of-the-mill, short-term strategic plans. These end up being nice-to-haves that end up not being implemented. Why? They are stuck in the today’s way of doing things, and unwittingly maintain the status quo.

In fortnightly newspaper columns since 2010, I have laid out many of the elements we use in the LeapOut Strategic Planning System. It’s possible to read them all and get some great shortcuts. You may even piece together an approach if you were to use a tool like ChatGPT to go back in time and reverse-engineer the advice I have shared.

But why do I work as a consultant, and facilitator? And why do I share the hidden secrets of the work we do? Shouldn’t I be concerned about being ripped off?

The simple answers are that working in companies like those in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and The Bahamas helps us offer custom solutions that fit the Caribbean. We live and work in the region because we want to move our companies forward, without having to rely on foreign expertise.

Our countries benefit when our organizations are well run, heading in the right direction.

That’s why in LeapOut, strategy is more than an intellectual exercise. Instead, it’s also a social activity and a chance to engage in a cultural transformation within the confines of a single organization.

As such, as a consultant and facilitator I have found that executives didn’t need to be told exactly what their strategies should be…they just need assistance in coordinating their best thinking. When we play the role of assistants and coaches, we help leaders fulfill their potential and play their part in transforming their country’s fortunes.

As such, our LeapOut retreats include me (a Cornell-trained engineer) and my colleague (and wife), Dale Pilgrim-Wade. She’s a trained counsellor and our team seeks to balance both social and intellectual outcomes which a transformational strategy requires.

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

• You work in a company which has talked about doing strategic planning differently.

• 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 by the end of the workshop.

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

• You’re looking for a pre-emptive strategic plan to deal with a range of threats.

Finally, you may be wondering…

Do I really NEED a pre-emptive, game-changing strategy? Will it even be implemented after the offsite is over?

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 wide arrange of threats which have emerged in the past few years.

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, than two decades prior. Thankfully, they anticipated these shifts: their 15-30-year plans are still their “True North.” While their short-term actions have changed, they have done so within a larger context.

It’s the very opposite of running around reacting to every new threat, like chickens with their heads cut off.

In our process, you’ll experience the calming effect of a long-term strategic plan. The process to develop it may not be easy due to contending visions of where the company should go. However, by the end you’ll be together, on the same page, heading in the same direction…perhaps for the first time ever.

If this resonates with you, don’t delay in reaching out.

FAQ’s