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Mr Joe Talks To... Alison coward | Awesome Offsites
In this episode, I sit down with Alison Coward, founder of Bracket, to talk about how to transform offsites and workshops from mere team-building events into crucial strategic tools that drive real results. Many leaders may see offsites as an expensive exercise with little return, but Alison shares how a well-structured workshop can turn that perception upside down.
We explore the common mistakes leaders make with workshops, like trying to achieve too much in too little time, and how to avoid the trap of unproductive sessions. Alison talks through her process for designing workshops that deliver – from setting the right objectives to ensuring follow-up leads to actual business change.
Curious to learn more about how you can turn your next offsite into a growth-driving, culture-shaping moment? Tune in to find out.
Show Links:
https://bracketcreative.co.uk/
My article about team offsites: https://bracketcreative.co.uk/team-time-together-designing-impactful-offsites-for-a-new-era-of-work/
Humble Inquiry: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humble-Inquiry-Instead-Telling-Leadership/dp/1609949811
Ideational Facilitation Leadership: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-09486-004
Offsites that work: https://hbr.org/2006/06/off-sites-that-work
Off to plan or off to lunch: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/off-to-plan-or-out-to-lunch-relationships-between-design-characte
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Hello, I'm Mr. Joe and welcome to my podcast. You may know me. I am a coach to CEOs of startups, high growth companies in large enterprises, and today I'm really excited to be chatting to Alison Coward. Hi, Alison. Do you wanna give yourself an introduction?
Alison Coward:Yeah, thanks, Joe. So my name is Alison Coward. I am the founder of a team culture consultancy called Bracket. The way that I describe Bracket is that we work with forward thinking organizations to help them build high performing team cultures. And we take workshops and Programs and training all around helping teams work better together. Personally, I'm an author I speak at conferences from time to time and yeah, facilitation, coaching, all of those nice things.
Joe:Great, and you've got a book out, haven't you, at the moment called Workshop Culture. That's your new book, right? So we want to talk about workshops today because I think I want to, we can dispel some myths about workshops, especially at that kind of C suite level where they're often seen as being just, a little bit, a bit of shit, really. at that level, it's a group of people in a conference room somewhere, all chatting with a whiteboard. There's no sort of, there's nothing, no life to it. do workshops have to be at that level? Do they have to be bad? what does a good workshop at that sort of C suite level look like? very
Alison Coward:Yeah, I think, The main reasons that workshops don't work, there's lots of reasons why they don't work, but I would say that if they don't, if they're not working at that level, it's because people have the wrong perception of what a workshop is. A workshop isn't just about getting everyone in a room and having some post it notes and a whiteboard and everyone speaking and, it being a little bit less being actually completely, unstructured conversation, which might be the opposite of what you might think of a formal meeting. A workshop is a space where you do need to design that process. You do need to be really specific. You need to know what you want to achieve who are the right people to be in that room? What are the questions and areas that you want to explore together? And, what's the, final result that you're looking for? And then you need to think about all the different. dynamics that might happen in that workshop and design for that. So, yeah, I think when workshops don't work is when people have this misconception that it's just about, but let's all get into a room together and have a
Joe:to thrash it out.
Alison Coward:fun, creative, blue sky. Yeah. Exactly. it's interesting cause I've just recently written an article about off sites which are obviously, very, popular within the kind of management calendar, strategic planning calendar. And I think recently they've been democratized a lot more probably because of remote working and the need to get teams together at various times throughout the year to, spend time together. But historically they have been off sites have been this Format for management teams to. get together and talk about the future of the organization. And the first article that I came across around off sites was I think from, oh gosh, I think it was 2006. It's an article on Harvard business review called off-sites that work So even then, this idea of these kind of collaborative conversations, people could see the value of them, but they weren't working in terms of how much. it costs to take people out of the office, get people together in an expensive location. Perhaps hiring a facilitator. So yeah, so this idea of getting people together, probably the most expensive people in the organization, at an expensive location for a length of time, which obviously costs And yet, these conversations weren't, not only, you might have had a good time in those sessions And it might have felt productive, but they weren't leading to anything in the business. They weren't leading to any change. And so this article, Offsites at Work, was about how to, not only have a productive discussion, but also make sure that they have real value for the company. And I think when people have repeated experiences like that, where it's either the day itself, wasn't useful, or the day may have been useful, it might have felt like fun, but then there was no results afterwards, doing that time and time again, it gives workshops a bit of a bad name
Joe:there's always this hope, isn't it? We'll just, we'll get everybody in a room and then fingers crossed, the magic will happen. But it's like, what you're saying is that they need, you need objectives. You need to know what you're working towards in these as well. And some sort of structure, cause you, you mentioned there as well, that there's the opposite side of this, which are meetings where you know, it's death by PowerPoint, which is the opposite, where there's no sort of real collaboration going on. And it seems that people fall to one side or another, where there's far too much structure. Reams of PowerPoint or no structure at all. A vague hope that something's going to come from it. And you need that middle ground, don't you? Where you need to set objectives and design that day. And I like the way you talked about designing it. So if you were going to design like an offsite for a C suite team, what kind of, talk us through how you would go about doing something like that.
Alison Coward:Yeah, what just popped into my head is that, think about your offsite as a mini project that you're going to be working on together, and for anything that you're doing, you're going to sit down and you think okay, what is the reason, i. e. what is the purpose of this? Think about The purpose, the outcomes always. recommend thinking or fast forwarding to the end of the offsite or even beyond the end of the offsite. So imagine that this offsite has gone in the way that you intended. We'd had a brilliant conversation. We'd got the results that we wanted. What would be happening in the business as a result? And then. Work backwards from there. Think about the outcomes, think about things that You need to produce as a result of your time together and then start thinking about, let's say, who's going to be in the room
Joe:going
Alison Coward:I have a process, which is literally that purpose and outcomes, outputs, and then, brainstorming all of the questions that you need to explore together. And the reason you need to start. from questions is because you want to avoid that deaf by PowerPoint. If people are just coming along and it's about each person presenting their point of view they have an agenda, they want to get their point across. That's not the environment for a productive discussion. Actually, you want to go from the perspective that we are starting from scratch together and we've got all these things. that we want to discuss and we're going to be creating value together. the value hasn't been created yet. We are going to be using this time to create value together, develop new ideas, solve problems. And so once you've identified all of those different areas, that's when you've got almost like the the sections or the themes that you will want to discuss. And cover in your offsite all the things that you need to do, what you want to achieve. And that's when you can start planning your structure out. Okay, what makes sense for us to address in what order?
Joe:to
Alison Coward:there might be an element of looking back. I'm actually just writing a newsletter about a big picture thinking template that I love teams to do. Like looking back What did we want to achieve? Did we achieve it? Looking at outside influences. What's our competition doing? What's happening in the industry? What trends are we seeing? And then starting to ideate about the future and think, okay, what do we want to do in the future? What resources do we have? What resources are we missing? What is our ideal state? All of those kinds of things. And, but that has to be structured. Those questions you have to create a structure, not only as to what the questions are you want to ask. Answer, but how you're going to discuss. Those questions together because there are different formats that you can use, you can do, some individual thinking, you can have breakout groups, you can have teams doing problem solving sessions together where they present, but you can, there's lots of different tools and techniques that you can use to manage those conversations that will come right at the end. But once you've figured out, okay, what is it that we are going to get together and talk about
Joe:I love that. I love the way you talk about asking and posing questions as well, because that then shifts the energy, doesn't it? Cause often what is people talk about wanting vague things like alignment or, you Being that death by PowerPoint, where you're just giving people information and going, do you agree with this team? Yes or no? And that's quite an awkward situation for somebody to be in. But if you pose everything as a question, here's the background, what should we do about this? It encourages that discussion rather than, you limiting your ideas to just the ones that have been presented. Now that approach of asking, going in with questions is a lovely way to think about it. Almost like a menu of the things that you want to do. That's really not a really nice approach. I really like that. And I can see then how that leads to a structure. Of you getting some useful things out of it, doesn't it? Then if you're going into that, assuming you don't have the answers, really.
Alison Coward:Absolutely. It's going with that curiosity. And those questions can even be sourced by speaking to everyone individually before. So you might have someone who is leading, you might have an external facilitator, like my, myself or you, and that is planning that offsite. And we may have Individual conversations with everybody on the team to say, okay, you're going to be spending a day together. What do you think would be most important or most useful for you to discuss? And then using that to plan the outline.
Joe:No, I really like that. It's a nice way to think about it as well, cause then you get some real structure around the offsite and you've got a clear idea of actually what you're working towards and what the point of the offsite is rather than obviously getting people together and there's somehow magic that you're going to create off the back of it. So talk me through then what other things can go wrong with offsites? What are the things in your experience? Have you seen where these sorts of things have not gone to plan? What are the mistakes that a lot of people make?
Alison Coward:I think trying to do too much. Again, the article that I wrote, Recently, I just scoured through all the conversations that I've had with teams and the offsites that we've run at Bracket and realized that there are three areas that you can use an offsite for. And this, this can be a C suite, but it can also be other teams within an organization. One of the top reasons that people say, we want to have an offsite is because it's for the kind of team bonding and we want to build our team. That is great, but then if you're expecting business results out of that as a result, then you're going to fail because you haven't, again, specified. Team bonding is one thing, and, getting to know each other, maybe doing some kind of activity that is more social. Then there might be a category which is around learning together, we want to learn new skills, understand a new topic that we haven't covered before together. And then there's the the creating together, which is like the traditional strategy development. Often, when I speak to Leaders that want to run off sites, they've got all of those mixed up We want to do an offsite and it's because we want to connect better as a team. We want to learn this topic, perhaps AI, and we want to develop some new ideas for our next project together. All of those are fine to want to achieve if you've got the time that it's possible to talk through all of those things together. If not, if you've got half a day or a day, then, you're going to have to make some choices. about what you what is most important to do. And so I think that's the first thing, having fuzzy goals. and if you have fuzzy goals and you don't really get the output. I think the other thing as well is connected to the fuzzy goals. misaligned expectations and thinking just by getting people together and having a conversation and even just, having a focused strategy discussion, there will be change in the business afterwards. even in my early days of facilitation, I felt this as a facilitator, getting a team together, having a really great conversation, and knowing, this is the concept behind my book, Workshop Culture, but knowing that even though the team had a great day together, there needed to be more work for them to really see the results of that in the business. and that transition from having a really creative, engaging, ideas generating conversation to translating those ideas into things that are actually going to make a difference is actually quite difficult. sometimes it's about resources. We need to get more resources to do this. Maybe we need to do more research. Sometimes it's a capacity or capability issue. sometimes the things that people want to do as a team, you haven't actually got the skills in your team to be able to implement them. So there's sometimes a real big gap between the idea and the execution. And whether people have the ability to first of all, put them into place, but translate that is another thing. And that's where people can get disappointed by the results of off sites. Absolutely.
Joe:right? That somehow, two people that did not work together. getting on or two teams aren't getting along, stick them in a room together. They'll work it out. Plus coming up with a strategy, plus learning about all these things. There's a huge expectation on that in such a short amount of time. And you're only going to be disappointed on all three of those things. Cause you haven't got the time to do any of them in any depth. That's really interesting, isn't it? So taking it a little bit more slowly and creating a bit of structure around, the, Those different elements, and I really like those three elements you talked about there, wasn't it? The kind of idea of that, was it alignment, learning, and those
Alison Coward:and creating.
Joe:three as well, it's just focusing, time on each of them, if that's what you want to do, but being clear on which are the ones you're trying to do at any one point. It's going to really help you to make sure you get those goals off the end of it. Now, that's a really lovely way to think about it. And what about that then? So you mentioned people often have quite high expectations around off sites workshops, these things as well. What about White space around some of this stuff then, cause again, you can pack that day full of stuff. Is that, is it important to pack things and get everybody working all the time? What's, what about white space and other space around some of that stuff?
Alison Coward:Yeah, absolutely. interesting, cause there's a bit of research that I refer to I think it's called Off to Plan or Off to Lunch. And it's something about strategy workshops, and it actually says, it talks about this challenge of, having a really intense day to focus on these things and the lack of follow up in the business. And it actually says that it's much better to do shorter strategy sessions over a longer period of time than try and do these kind of intense sessions together. the thing is the intensity feels good, doesn't it? And there is value to that intensity, but in terms of impact, actually, what we want to do is shift the behavior in our organizations to bring more strategic thinking in a more regular and consistent way, rather than only once a year. Yeah, that's, I think that's, it's, there is something to, to the intensity. The white space, the slack, when you're running a workshop, we can't work at full pelt all the time anyway. We do need to have some downtime, some time for individual thinking, the spaces In between. And I would also argue about trying to do everything in that one day and then thinking that's enough. Which is
Joe:We're
Alison Coward:segue if you're, if you want to take it in this direction, the concept behind workshop culture, which is that, there's a reason why we hold. Those offsites because we want collaboration And creativity. People think differently, but we need that in our organizations every single day. So how do we make that more of a regular behavior?
Joe:And that makes sense as well. Cause again we would love it to be just one hit, right? We'll do two, three, three days a year. We'll fix collaboration. We'll do strategy and it's done till next year. But what you're saying is, and I think we've probably all experienced this, is the offsite's great, but then you're back to work again on the Monday and everything's as it was. There's no sort of real change other than it was good. And so how do you do that then? How do you follow an offsite with something that's going to stick or last? What do you how do you do that?
Alison Coward:Yeah, I think it's as simple as a conversation about this. again, when we don't think about the barriers to translating some of these ideas into action, we miss out on some of the how challenging it can be. Sometimes, as I mentioned, in order to put an idea, to make an idea happen, we need to learn new skills. And so even just having a conversation about that, okay, this is an idea we have, what is it going to take to see the results in the business? What are the steps that we need to take? do we need to learn new skills? Do we need to get some extra expertise in and really mapping it out? Even down to, some of this is about behavior change. Some of this is about individuals developing, particularly It comes down to how the teams work together. There are going to be new habits that people need to develop. you might have a C suite team that wants to communicate more effectively and they want to share information across their teams more effectively. That's going to need to, you're going to need to do something different. Maybe it's, you might bring in a new tool, but the tool is only one side of it. The next part is actually using the tool and that's the. That's the tension, that's the barrier, not the buying the tool is easy, but the actually using it is the challenge when you haven't done it before.
Joe:I like that. So you have to frame the offsite as not something that just is two or three days away somewhere, right? It's got to be a longer lasting. And I like that when you talked about it early on as being a project, right? The project doesn't end on that Friday when everybody jumps on the plane and goes home again, right? It's got to be lasting. of changes that come into that, right? So that's follow ups, isn't it? That's things that you're following up from in terms of individual. You talked about some of the purposes and some of the objectives of what you're trying to do, following all of that up, but also not just, I like the way you talked about it as well, not just the strategy or the high level, Hey, we're going to do this kind of stuff, but also the resourcing conversations beneath that mean that. That can actually happen. So following it up in a very structured way. Now, would you suggest, what would be the best way to do that, right? Cause everybody's focused on the two or three days. Logistics for that, everything's there, right? What about effort focusing on that longer tail afterwards? What kind of, how much effort should they put into the, after the offsite as they put into the offsite itself? I really like
Alison Coward:I think just as much I always say that when you're designing any kind of workshop, in fact, that you should be thinking about the follow up as you're designing it. So you're almost like designing what that follow up looks like as you're structuring the workshop. Ideally, this is always very difficult to do, but spending a good chunk of time on this implementation aspect, often we get to the end of workshops. this happens in my workshops, I'm not always perfect at this, but we have a really great discussion when we get to all the 10 minutes at the end and it's okay, what are our actions? And actually you want to extend that conversation, Some of the best off sites that I have run have been where we've spent, two, sometimes three hours on that. These are the commitments. These are the actions. Now let's talk about what are the barriers, like what do we need to put in place to make it happen? And actually, almost again, design that into the conversation. So you're collaborating on what you're going to do afterwards to make sure that all of these things fall into place.
Joe:that. It's a nice way to think about it. So as much time on the, Planning the offsite as you are planning the follow ups to that as well. And you're, your point's right. We, I've been on so many workshops and offsites where the, the last 10 minutes of Friday has next steps. You've got 10 minutes and everybody just wants to get out of there at that point. So you're never really focusing on what those next steps are, ownership of those, who's taking those away, the follow up, because you just, you just, you think you're done because you've come up with the vision or the strategy. And the reality is you need those follow ups to make sure that happens, not, that's half of the job is done when you've got the strategy. The other half then is the implementation of that off the back of it. The really nice way to think about it, right? Half and half. Yeah, great. So what are the, some other tips then? So you do a lot of facilitating of offsites and things like that as well. What are some of the tips for, who should be the, doing the facilitating and the team? What, how does that kind of side of it work? Who's, who should be the person up there leading this stuff, say an offsite or a workshop?
Alison Coward:Yeah, ideally, the person that should be leading the workshop or facilitating the workshop is someone who doesn't have skin in the game because it can be very difficult to play that part of the facilitator who's guiding the discussion and guiding the process and someone who's contributing to the content. Ideally, you would have someone, it doesn't have to be an external facilitator, it could be someone from another team that has. But someone who is external to the people doing the work, I would suggest. At the same time, with these kind of big offsites, that's what I recommend. At the same time, the concepts behind workshop culture is that we're bringing P. these, this way of working And these tools into our work every day, in which case it's not always possible to bring in an external facilitator. And what we want is to bring those skills into the team. So it is the leader that sets up the space for those conversations to happen. But yeah, everybody has a
Joe:the
Alison Coward:to facilitate if they need to. There's another Research paper that I can give you these and you put them in the notes, but there's one on, it's called the concept is called Ideational CEO Facilitation. And there's some research that shows that the CEOs that are get the best results of their top management teams are the ones that have facilitation skills.
Joe:That's interesting.
Alison Coward:a researcher called Paul, Paulus and A. Carmele, and I'll send you the link to it, but it shows that sort of, the successful organizations are the ones where you have individuals that are skilled in bringing people together and having those productive conversations, which, it makes sense that we intuitively, we know this. This is the reason we have companies, because we need groups of people to do things together. And so it would make sense that within those companies, we have the ability to ensure that happens. And in reality, we know that doesn't always, that doesn't always happen in the most productive way.
Joe:It's a really nice way to think about it, isn't it really? So again, if you think about purely offset as well, the money you're spending on getting everybody in that room as well, having a facilitator in to get the most from those people, if you look at it from a purely financial point of view. It's isn't it, is a no brainer anyway, isn't it, really, to do that because of the cost and actually the importance of what you're putting the effort into, or at the very least, whoever that facilitator is, has the skills to be able to do that properly, rather than somebody who is volunteering, right? It's got to be somebody who's got the appropriate skills to be able to do that and to lead that properly anyway. That's interesting, isn't it? And I think what's interesting there also, to pick up on that point as well, is the skillset for facilitator is again, different. different set of skills for a leader than perhaps they're used to as well. So talk me through that. How do you get better at facilitating? Where's the sort of place to start with some of that? So if you want to be that facilitator, who's that great leader, CEO, how do you get started? Yeah.
Alison Coward:Yeah, so I think there's skills and there's mindset. And the mindset shift is largely, I don't need to be the one with all the answers. Because, often, again, through no fault, it's just the way that it is, leaders are promoted into positions because of their knowledge, their experience, their skill set. And when you then move into that position, it's not just about you, it's about you. Sharing what you know, it's about creating an environment for everybody on your team to share what they know. And that transition can be quite difficult to make. And so with that, I say start with getting good at asking, Great questions, being genuinely curious if you can, I guess there's a humility to it, and actually I did a session this morning where I referenced the book Humble Inquiry by Edgar Shine, and that's a really great book to read. the book talks all about the value of asking questions and taking that curious approach in business. And what it can do, not only for business results, but for relationships as well. So I would start there, asking really great questions getting better at asking questions. Even if it's, just take something small that you feel you don't feel vulnerable around, and take it to a meeting. I've got this challenge coming up, what do you think? And putting it out to your team. And then asking questions around that. And then, twinned with asking great questions is also listening. You can't just ask questions and then have not actually take into mind what people say. So you have to, cultivate those listening skills. And there are, we all know the term active listening and what that means not listening to respond, but listening to understand, giving people space, Questions that enable people to go deeper and reflect. So yeah, so I'd start with those two as a, as a base level. And then I talk about two other skills, which is again, I think this is a bit more of a mindset, but being prepared that when you ask those genuine questions and you listen intently, the responses that come back may be what you not, but may not be what you expect. And that is part of it, letting go. of that certainty letting go of control, in a sense, and being genuinely curious to hear what people think. And with that, that does bring a level of discomfort because, Leaders have got so much on their, they've got so much on their shoulders. And when you start to bring that more collaborative environment into your team, you're going to, you have to let go of that control. So it brings a little bit of kind of uncertainty, a little bit of uncomfortable, discomfort. I always Also refer to this as like in a workshop environment, if you do ask questions, wait for people to respond and you create the environment where everyone can speak up, can also feel a little bit chaotic. And, in the business world, we don't like chaos. We like everything to be tidy and clean and, logical in a, in, A nice kind of easy sequence and a workshop, an effective workshop will blow all of that out of the water. So you have to get comfortable with that, but you get through to the other end and then you're, as an objective, someone who's outside of the content, you're able to spot those connections, bring things together. So I look at this cycle of asking questions, listening, dealing with what comes up, which might be a bit messy and a bit chaotic, and then somehow bringing it. together into something that you can move forward with. It's almost like that divergent, convergent thinking model.
Joe:It's a really lovely way to think about it, actually, it's a lot of work I do with the CEOs that I coach is both of those things, because you're right, you get promoted to that point as a leader, often because you're an expert, and You're used to having the answers, right? That's been your superpower. And that can count against you in leadership because you probably don't anymore. There are people who know a lot more about you, a lot more than you who are out there. And that's great. Those are the people you want to hire. And so it's very tempting to be that person because that's done you well in your career. So one of the exercises I set some of my CEOs to help them get over that discomfort is not to ask is to only ask questions. If they're giving an answer. They lose a point for every question they ask, they get two points. And at the end of the week, we give them a tally score because again, it's just a muscle that you need to build up. And the more you get used to that, who knows what you're going to learn and where that's going to take you in terms of the future of your business. Cause you can't know everything because again, it's just you. That's how you leverage a team at the end of the day. Thank you so much for your time today, Alison. I've learned, it's been great. I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Really. Thank you very much.
Alison Coward:Great questions. Thank
Joe:Where can where can people learn more about you? Where should they go to learn more about you?
Alison Coward:You can find me on LinkedIn. So I'm Alison Coward on LinkedIn. My website bracket is actually bracket creative.co uk and you can also search for my book workshop culture. I should be the first person that comes up if you type up workshop culture and the link to various places to, to find out more about that as
Joe:Great. And you mentioned your newsletter as well, didn't you? As well. That sounds like it's something that's interesting as well. Is that your bracket creative as well?
Alison Coward:Yeah,
Joe:there too as well.
Alison Coward:can hit the website. Yeah, you can find the link to sign up to that.
Joe:Thanks again for your time.
Alison Coward:Thank you.
