Seven Powerful Prompts for More Strategic Conversations (Facilitation Friday #75)
Compelling quotes provide a helpful mental warm-up prior to strategy conversations.
Warming up and getting your blood flowing with a few core movements or cardio is a sensible start to a strength workout. It gets your muscles ready for the heavier lifting that follows without overly taxing them.
When facilitating strategy conversations or strategic planning processes, it is similarly advisable to help participants “warm up” their mental muscles before taking on the heavier lift of the issues and questions to address. Sessions that don’t may unintentionally limit participants’ creative and strategic thinking efforts.
For this, I often use prompts, compelling quotes supporting the outcomes for a conversation, meeting, or workshop. I usually pair prompts with relevant discussion questions.
Four Ways to Use Prompts
Whether used as part of a comprehensive planning process or as discussion catalysts for a committee, board, or team conversation, strategy prompts are excellent warm-ups for more substantive strategic conversations. They also can provoke useful conversations and actionable insights when used as part of any meeting or workshop.
At the end of this post, I provide seven prompts for more strategic conversations. Here are four ways to incorporate them in your facilitation work.
1. As part of icebreaking efforts
When thinking about breaking the ice, attention often rightly focuses on interpersonal connections among participants. But we also may need to prime participants’ brainpower for the collaborative work ahead.
Draw from the prompts I provide and/or curate a selection of prompts relevant to your session outcomes. Assign each prompt to one or more tables/groups in your session (or virtual breakout rooms) along with a few application questions. Have them discuss their prompt and then briefly share their thoughts with the large group.
Or place a different prompt (quote) at each person’s spot at a table. Then have them read their quotes silently, go around the table and introduce themselves (if necessary), share their quote, and briefly discuss your application questions.
A final option is to randomly distribute prompts/quotes to all participants, have them find and join with others possessing the same quote, introduce themselves, discuss their quote and your application questions, and then return to their table to share their prompt and what their group thought about it.
2. At the start of specific content segments
You can use prompts to frame individual agenda items or conversations within a meeting or workshop.
I often share the prompt and then facilitate brief conversation to help seed the thinking and connect the prompt’s connections to the agenda item that follows.
If using prompts to frame conversations, be sure your choices do not inappropriately bias subsequent thinking. To help prevent this I usually invite groups to think critically about whatever prompt I’ve chosen: What, if anything, about this quote/thinking doesn’t resonate with you or seems potentially unhelpful?
3. As inspiration for survey responses
Sometimes you may wish to use the prompts not as conversation catalysts, but to inspire more thoughtful or creative survey responses.
Simply pair a relevant prompt with one or more questions you pose to elicit individuals’ perspectives on the prompt’s concept or idea.
Surveys often read as bland impersonal blocks of texts. Adding the power of a visually compelling prompt can make your effort more appealing. Make sure you include ALT text descriptions.
4. As a leveling tool in pre-work
Socializing participants’ expectations for meetings and workshops is important. This may be particularly useful with strategic planning processes that convene diverse stakeholders. Here’s why.
People often have different ideas of what a planning process should entail, as well as the meaning they associate with common strategy concepts or terms, and the role of strategy in an organization: Wait, is this a goal? An objective? What does a good strategy look like?
Include level-setting prompts as part of pre-reading to help establish a shared understanding about strategy. When participants convene, facilitate discussion of the prompts to clarify the concepts they contain and the process you will facilitate.
Seven Favorite Strategy Prompts
The PDF below contains seven of my favorite prompts, ones that always help provoke more strategic thinking and conversation. Each is accompanied by a short description of its purpose and value, as well as tips on how to use it. You really want to download this resource.
Bottom Line
Carefully curated quotes are a simple and effective catalyst for better discussions and decisions. Be sure to draw from diverse sources and voices to inform the thinking you hope to prompt and to effectively warm up participants’ mental models and muscles for the work of strategic thinking and planning.
Getting in Action
Review the seven prompts provided in the PDF and identify future meetings or workshops where you can incorporate one or more of them.
Brainstorm additional ways you might use strategy prompts or catalysts beyond the four suggested in this essay.
Think about the group dynamics you’ve noticed or experienced in strategy conversations. Select one and find quotes you could use as a prompt for it.
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