News | Client Guides
The secret to better strategy meetings
Every business leader wants a successful strategy for their organisation, but actually getting there is another story.
It starts in the meeting room. Most leadership teams still approach strategy sessions in the same way: a slide deck is presented, people talk around the table, everyone takes individual notes, and the words quickly evaporate. Too often, teams leave with different understandings of what was agreed, uncertain about next steps and how to put ideas into action.
Visual thinking, (also known as graphic facilitation, graphic recording and live scribing), turns those conversations into something visible, to bring clarity and alignment to strategy sessions. Because if you can’t see what people mean, how do you create a shared vision and understanding?
It’s not just pretty pictures, visual thinking is about making connections clearer, and aligns leadership teams to implement successful strategy.
So here are our top tips for running better strategy meetings using visual thinking.
Define your purpose
A well-intentioned agenda or conversation won’t amount to anything if its original goal isn’t clear. The best tool to use is PREP. An acronym for:
Purpose
Roles & Resources
Expected Outcomes
Plan
This was developed by the top facilitators at our sister brand, TFP to help plan for and navigate the meetings they facilitate. It’s now also used daily by many of our client organisations to help them have much, much better meetings.
Read more about PREP and how to put it into action here.
This is a snippet of a visual we created to capture the key messages from a conversation between Helen Varda (Chapman) and Ellie Chapman. The webinar talks about PREP and the TFP Meeting Kaleidoscope - access it via the link above.
Make it visible
When strategy is only talked about, details can disappear and meaning can get lost.
By mapping out ideas, priorities and decisions as they emerge, patterns form and connections are made. Those lightbulb moments happen and it accelerates decision making.
A clear picture starts to emerge of what needs to be done and how to make it happen.
Make sure you hear every voice
If you want a strategy that feels collaborative and that the team supports, then listening to every voice (especially the person with the different perspective) is essential.
Visual thinking supports this by capturing thoughts and ideas on paper so everyone feels heard.
Play with the process of your meeting. Not every conversation needs to happen in one large group. Forming breakout groups with visual templates for people to work through allows space for ideas to be worked through in more detail.
A glimpse into Rosedene Nursery's Team Away Day - hosted on the Founders farm. Here the team are creating moodboards using magazines.
Actionable next steps
If you’ve worked visually throughout your meeting, everyone should be on the same page and your next steps should be crystal clear.
Take a photo and share it with the group, so the visuals stay as working tools to support conversations until the next meeting.
The results
Leadership teams are aligned, with clarification on thinking. Everyone leaves with a shared understanding of how to make the strategy a reality.
Don’t believe us? Here is some feedback from our client on how strategy visuals helped them.
Your visuals are with us EVERYDAY and EVERYWHERE.
Angela Maragopoulou, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Sunlight Group
'We’re frequently using the visual internally when talking about our set-up and how we contribute to our strategy and purpose – it’s really serving us well.'
Mars