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Designing the Room: Facilitating a High-Stakes Strategic Planning Retreat
A divided nonprofit board, a funding crisis, and a two-day retreat that will explode if you don't design it right. The room is yours.
Duration
90 min
Difficulty
Advanced
Stakeholders
4
Company Size
Small (20-100)
Organizational Background
Horizon Community Foundation is a 45-person nonprofit that provides housing, mental health, and workforce development services in an urban community. It has a $6.2M budget and a 14-member board. The organization is facing a 22% reduction in federal funding that will take effect in 7 months. The leadership team and board disagree fundamentally about strategic direction: one faction believes the organization should specialize and go deep in housing only; another believes in preserving the integrated service model. The Executive Director, who has been in the role for 11 months, has never navigated a crisis of this scale. Two previous strategic planning processes collapsed without consensus. A board member has informally suggested that the ED may not be the right leader for a turnaround. You have been retained to design and facilitate a two-day retreat that must produce a strategic decision, not just a conversation. Tensions are at a breaking point.
Key Stakeholders
Learning Objectives
- Apply facilitation design principles to high-stakes, conflict-prone group processes
- Distinguish the facilitator's role from the consultant, coach, and mediator roles
- Use structured dialogue techniques to surface and work with divergent values
- Design retreat agendas that move groups from exploration to decision
- Navigate covert power dynamics and undisclosed agendas in group settings
- Apply conflict transformation frameworks to ideological organizational disagreements
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