The quarterly planning session is not where the thinking happens. The thinking happens in the ten days before, when people have time to reflect without an agenda in front of them. The session is where you compare notes. If nobody has done the thinking, the session is just a meeting.
Send the pre-work ten days out, not two days out ¶
Two days is not enough time for people to think properly. It is enough time to fill in a form quickly and move on. Ten days gives people the chance to sit with the questions, come back to them, and write something honest. You will get better answers and the session will be more useful. Send it early. Chase it at the five-day mark.
Ask three questions, not fifteen ¶
Pre-work documents with fifteen questions get skimmed. Pre-work with three questions gets answered properly. The three questions we use: What did we say we would do last quarter? What actually happened? What is the one thing blocking us that we have not said out loud yet? That third question is the one that matters. It surfaces the things that do not come up in normal meetings.
Read everything before you walk in the room ¶
If you are facilitating the session, read every pre-work response before the session starts. Look for patterns. Look for contradictions. Look for the thing that three people mentioned and one person did not. That preparation is most of the facilitation work. The session itself is just the conversation that the pre-work made possible.
Use the pre-work to set the agenda, not the other way around ¶
Do not set the agenda before you read the pre-work. Set it after. The pre-work tells you what the team actually needs to talk about. If you set the agenda first, you are guessing. If you set it after reading the responses, you are responding to what is real. This is a small change that makes a significant difference to whether the session produces anything useful.
If you want the two-page pre-work template we use with every client, sign up via the form on the home page and we will send it over. If you want us to design and run the session for you, have a look at the quarterly planning facilitation service.