I think it’s appropriate that, by chance, my 400th blog is about workshopping. Facilitating board, executive, and team workshops is my favourite part of what I do. It’s challenging, always incredibly interesting, and rewarding as I help others draw conclusions from their deliberations.

Whether you call it a risk workshop or a strategy implementation workshop, it is the same reason you are gathering people together, to contemplate the success of your planned strategy. You know you can’t foolproof implementation of your strategy. No matter how good it is.

One option is Red Teaming which I have written about before. That is, establishing a team that was not involved in the development of the strategy, and give them the job of assessing, re-thinking, testing and re-engineering your strategy. Take on board their findings and recommendations and decide for yourself how good your strategy is and what you will move ahead with and how.

Forming a Red Team might seem a bit over-the-top or impractical for one reason or another. The alternative is the workshop approach. An independent facilitation of self-assessment of your strategy by you and your team. Here are some key tips on how to go about it:

Pre-workshop – Run a set of analysis tools and/or refresh the ones you did in developing your strategy. My favourites are a stakeholder analysis, PESTLE, and my own Capability Analysis tool for assessing the internal capability of your organisation. Sometimes I will run Porter’s “Industry Five Forces” and/or a Unique Selling Proposition or Value Chain Analysis. It depends on the circumstances.

For-Workshop – I take each strategy and I make a list of all the “things” that will need to be managed for it to be successful. Everything from changes to the supply chain to the change management challenges to make a cultural shift. These are the things that “must go right”. I also prepare a list of things that “could go wrong”.

In-Workshop – I work through my list asking those present if each item is valid and, if so, how do they intend to manage it. That is “what are you doing about it”. We also cover “things” on their minds they want to get into the open for a discussion.

There you have it. For a risk or strategy implementation workshop, you only need to ask three questions:

• What must go right?
• What could go wrong?
• What are you doing about it?

As Chair of a board, these are three great questions to ask management to address for the coming quarter next time they are reporting on progress to plan.