HappyFirms

A one-day offsite that decides something

A running order for a single day, with the activities placed where they do work.

For
A team of eight to forty with one substantial thing to resolve.
Horizon
One day, nine until four
Sessions
6

Built on the principle that an offsite can do one substantial thing well. The activities here are not breaks from the work sessions — each one feeds the session that follows it. Finish at four; the last two hours of a nine-to-six agenda have never produced anything.

The schedule

  1. 09:00, 20 min

    Open with movement and mixing, not a slide

    Two rounds, the second one chosen so the line reorders completely. Gets people talking to someone other than the person they travelled with, which is otherwise the seating plan for the whole day.

    The Silent Line-Up
  2. 09:30, 75 min

    Map what the group actually knows

    Before any discussion of priorities. The map changes who speaks in the session afterwards, because it has just been established in public who knows what.

    The Map of Who Knows What
  3. 11:00, 90 min

    The main work session

    Your actual agenda item — the strategy, the decision, the problem. Before lunch, while the group is fresh. This is what the day is for and it gets the best ninety minutes.

    Your own agenda item
  4. 13:30, 75 min

    Stress-test the thing you just decided

    Immediately after lunch, on the decision from the morning. The tense discipline matters: it failed, write the post-mortem. Teams find things here that a risk discussion before lunch would never have produced.

    The Pre-Mortem
  5. 15:00, 60 min

    Something with a different register

    A short, physical or creative activity after the heavy session. Not a reward for the morning — a genuine change of mode before the close.

    The Paper Tower The Pitch Pit
  6. 16:00, 30 min

    Close with named actions

    Read back every commitment with an owner and a date. Agree the review date in the room. Then stop — do not add a final session because there is time.

    Your own agenda item

What it looks like when it is working

  • The decisions and owners were sent out within two days with nobody having to chase.
  • At the review date, more than half the commitments were done.
  • Someone raises a pre-mortem risk in a normal meeting three weeks later, by name.

Things that are hard to recover from

  • Do not add a fourth work session into the afternoon gap. The gap is load-bearing.
  • Whoever facilitates should not also be the person who owns the decision. Split those two roles or the afternoon becomes a sales pitch.
  • If an overnight stay is involved, check in advance that everyone can do one — and make the substantive content happen in normal hours regardless.