Case Analysis

STRATEGY METHODOLOGIES 519

ILLUSTRATION 15.4

A tale of two workshops

How strategy workshops are designed is a significant influence on

their success.

Given the growth of the business the directors of

Hotelco * decided to hold two two-day workshops to

rethink the organisational structure needed for the

company’s future strategic direction. Both workshops

were facilitated by an external consultant.

Workshop 1 The first workshop was held in a luxury rural hotel in

the south of England far away from Hotelco’s modest

offices. This was not just to ‘get away from the office’,

but also because: ‘It freed up the mind . . . It was a

great experience.’

Together with one of the directors, the facilitator

had organised the agenda. The ‘command style’ of

the CEO was replaced by a participative approach

orchestrated by the facilitator: ‘He made it a more

level playing field.’ He had interviewed staff about

the core values of the business and provided a report

to the directors as a basis for the discussion: ‘Does

everyone know what Hotelco stands for?’

The directors became genuinely engaged with the

discussion: ‘It focused our minds. It made us all

understand the things we were good at and . . . the

things we were weak at and what we needed to do.’

They regarded the workshop as a success, concluding

that a change was needed from an authoritarian, com-

mand management style to a more structured and

devolved approach to management, with responsibil-

ity being passed to middle levels, so freeing up the

top team to focus more on strategy.

This outcome was not, however, carried forward.

On their return to the office, the directors came to the

conclusion that what was agreed during the workshop

was unrealistic, that they were ‘carried away with the

process’. The result was significant back-tracking but

without a clear consensus on a revised structure for

the business.

Workshop 2 The second two-day workshop, two months later, was

for the top team and their seven direct reports and

used the same facilitator. It took place in one of the

group’s own hotels. Again the workshop began with a

discussion of the interviews on Hotelco’s values. One

of the directors then made a presentation raising the

idea of an operational board. However, in discussion

it emerged that the directors were not uniformly com-

mitted to this – especially the CEO. Eventually, as the

facilitator explained: ‘I had to sit the four directors

in another room and say: look, until you sort this

out, you’re just going to create problems . . . The four

directors got into a heated argument and forgot about

the other seven.’

This was not, however, how the directors saw it.

Their view was that the facilitator was seeking to

impose a solution rather than facilitate discussion.

With the directors in one room and the direct

reports in another, the comments of each group were

transmitted between rooms by the facilitator. It was a

situation that satisfied no one. In the afternoon the

CEO intervened, replacing the idea of a seven-person

‘operational board’ with an intermediary level of three

‘divisional directors’.

No one was content with the workshop. One of the

seven who was not to be a divisional director com-

mented: ‘I didn’t know where I sat any more. I felt my

job had been devalued.’ A director also recognised:

‘We left these people feeling really deflated.’

* Hotelco is a pseudonym for a small UK hotel group.

Questions 1 Evaluate the design of the two workshops in

terms of the guidelines in section 15.4.1 .

2 If you were a facilitator, how would you have

organised the workshops differently?

3 What benefits (or disadvantages) might such

workshops have in comparison with other

approaches to strategy development for such

an organisation?

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