Strategy Workshop Facilitation
Leadership & Strategy Workshop facilitation augmented by AI and proven frameworks
Bring Your People Together
Diversity is the secret to great decisions. A wide range of views and perspectives distilled down to well informed and reasoned decisions. But sometimes that's not how it works. Sometimes there are voices in the room that side-track the conversation and drown out good ideas. Engaging a facilitator to run your Strategy Workshops and Planning Meetings generates alignment and accountability. A third party who can manage timekeeping and ensure everyone is aligned helps you build a better strategy.
The Benefits of Facilitation
An independent, impartial, 3rd party facilitator helps your teams make better decisions.
100% Team Commitment
Team members take personal ownership because they were part of building the plan. The facilitator is the coach. Your people are playing the game.
Rapid Alignment
Dissolved functional silos and diffusion of personal politics. Shared goals are linked to outcomes and followed up through OKRs
Better Decisions, Faster
Part mediation, part arbitration. A facilitator provides context and a 3rd party lens that combines insight from impacted parties while ticking the admin boxes.
Shared Cultural Understanding
Strategy is a reflection of culture. Not just your organisation's attitudes and stance, but that of your market and your stakeholders. A facilitator helps bring the voices of customers and others impacted by your strategy decisions into the room.
Speaking to Power
Independent workshop facilitation experts give team members permission to question assumptions, challenge each other constructively, and explore issues and opportunities. Some leaders hate it. But it makes for better decisions.
Clear Accountability
Structured facilitation produces firm decisions with named owners, not vague intentions. We use AI note taking technology to identify actions and assign them to the right people. In some cases we can use a timestamped video archive to resolve disputes.
Meet our Facilitators
Over 30 years experience across multiple sectors and markets..
Christina Ioannidis
Speaker, Trainer, Strategy Workshop Facilitator
Christina not only facilitates Strategy planning workshops, she is also a sought after panel and round-table moderator and conference and event MC. Christina speaks 5 languages and is the primary workshop facilitator for Top of Her Game.
✽ How it Wolks
Its a journey.
Learning about you & your stakeholders
Before your workshop, we create surveys and conduct key stakeholder interviews to understand your organisation’s context, challenges, and the issues that need to be surfaced. This reveals the real issues, uncovers hidden tensions, and ensures your facilitator walks into the room deeply familiar with your organisation, your team, and the key questions you need to answer.
Who is in the room? What do they want?
Your Leadership Team's time is important. We design your strategy planning workshop agenda to match your specific objectives. We decide together what conversations need to happen, in what order, and how much time each deserves. The agenda is purposeful and flexible, allowing for the deep dives that matter while keeping energy and momentum high throughout.
Be prepared...
You say you are a data-led organisation. Be prepared to back your position. Bring receipts. Be ready to defend your ideas and your recommendations. The facilitator is not a consultant. We are not there to do the work for you. We don't want to hear - 'I'll get back to you on that.' We want to be able to make informed decisions there and then.
We are the conductor. You are the orchestra.
Our facilitators understand meetings and workshops. So we know when to get back to work after a coffee break or ensure people aren't looking at their phones when they should be contributing. We know how to structure the session after lunch to keep the momentum going. And our facilitators are practitioners. They may have seen it before and may be able to suggest innovative courses of action.
A pledge to act.
Talking is great, but rarely achieves anything on its own. Accountability for decisions and the actions relating to those decisions is important. This can be achieved through software that assigns actions and tracks progress. We are a big fan of company wide OKRS, but sometimes just a written pledge or statement of intent is enough.
AI Supported Notes & Insights
If you are not already using AI to take notes, identify actions and capture insights, then maybe you should be. Most tools - from Gemini to Teams to Monday to Otter offer this. We work with your processes and workflows to translate meeting and workshop outputs into actions. Audio, Video and written transcripts can be used for clarification, memory aids and dispute resolution later.
Let's Have a Chat
Our solution is designed with local cultural norms in mind. Whether you are a private company or a government organization, our facilitators understand who is in the room and how to respect your organisational culture.
Frequently Asked Questions
Strategy Planning Workshop Facilitation.
It depends. The cost of professional facilitation varies considerably depending on the specific needs of your team, the numbers involved and the outcomes required.
Fees can range from as little as $USD 5,000 for shorter, team-based events up to $USD 45,000 for Leadership, Board, National or International engagements.
Other drivers of cost include:
- Venue and Logistics (Travel, accomodation, catering etc)
- Discovery, including interviews & surveys
- Add-on events e.g. Team Building, Training, Dinner
- Post-workshop follow up including AI licenses and Dashboards.
- Administration & workflow requirements (Archiving, Compliance, Board Responsibilities)
We recommend 2 day workshops. 1 day can work if everyone comes prepared, but it can feel rushed. 2 days allows for more consideration, with an evening event often helping to create a sense of comradery and alignment. Being able to reflect on day one with the benefit of a night's sleep can also create better outcomes. 3 days is a long time for leaders to be out of the office.
The hard part is finding a time in all the leaders' diaries, so make sure you leave enough time to plan and have some fallback dates.
We have been facilitating workshops on four continents for over 20 years. Our facilitators are practitioners with experience in professional development, consulting and training, comfortable speaking to the highest and the lowest people in an organisation.
Our facilitators understand local culture and markets and educate themselves about emerging trends and technologies to ensure that strategies are forward looking and 'future-proofed'.
Aquitude facilitators have worked in a wide variety of industry sectors including Healthcare, Customer Experience, Sport, Travel, Media, FMCG Manufacturing and Marketing, Fintech, Start-ups, Marine, Not-for-profit, sustainability, luxury goods, local and national government.
Workshops have been facilitated in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, United Kingdom, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia.
Yes. Planning workshops can be run at a company level, business unit level, department level or local team level. Talk to us about specific workshops for Marketing Strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Digital Transformation Strategy, AI Strategy and more.
Other Workshops from Aquitude
Specialised guided workshops that use proven frameworks and include professional development and training.
Growth Strategy Workshop
Our 'back to basics' growth strategy workshop begins with an honest audit of where you are and where you could be. 3rd party facilitation helps to build a strategy that can be delivered.
Marketing Strategy Workshop
From Value Proposition to Customer Personas to Product Development, Price Positioning and Perception shaping - our Marketing & Brand Strategy Workshop delivers value.
Customer Experience Typology Framework
How customer-centric is your business - really? This custom framework benchmarks attitudes towards customer experience throughout your organisation to provide foundation for CX strategy.
Scenario Planning
A powerful technique to create strategies in uncertain times. Map alternative futures and prepare for potential risk or discover gaps in the market and emerging opportunities.