Surface the most pressing issues through pre-meeting qualitative research.

technique — attributed to Mary Boone

Before any senior leadership retreat she designs, Boone runs a significant amount of qualitative research to get the leaders to surface the issues most pressing for them, in their own words. Challenges, opportunities, blockages, ambitions. The entire event is then designed around what the research returns. By the time the retreat starts, every participant who needs to own the meeting has already invested in defining what it is for. The agenda is not handed down. It is excavated. The discipline removes the gap between what the team thinks the meeting is about and what they actually need it to do.

For facilitators designing high-stakes leadership offsites or strategy retreats. Most effective when there is time for fifteen to thirty individual interviews before the design phase begins.

pre-event-research, qualitative-interviews, agenda-design, leadership-retreats