Have you ever had an offsite where the list of initiatives turned out to be the same as the ones from last year? The slides in the deck offer tools, templates, and tips to keep that from happening ever again.

The key is to capture and communicate the rich thinking at the offsite using the Change Framework Template to tell the story of change, first for the enterprise writ large and then for each initiative the team decides to set up for success.

Further, high-performing management teams need a way to discriminate between a plethora of possible initiatives to identify those they want to be sure are successful given limited resources. Towards that end, these slides are accompanied by a spreadsheet that teams can use to enter a portfolio of initiatives, and their ease of implementation and potential for value creation, to generate a Heat Map that lays out a graphical view of those that likely deserve the most attention.

Finally, before a team leaves an offsite, time should be allocated to filling out the Initiative-to-Action template to keep the initiative from ending up dying on a list that never sees the light of day.