Open Items

When an exec team is gathering for an offsite meeting, I send them a few questions ahead of the meeting. It's part of their meeting prep. These questions get them thinking about the state of things. Prompts for stepping back and thinking deeply.

One of the first things we do during an offsite meeting is capture "open items." People come to these meetings with something on their mind. They may not have articulated it when we were building the agenda. But in the course of their travels to the meeting, they get a little down time. That often surfaces some issues we need to deal with. The prompt questions I send help prime the pump for this.

Starting the meeting this way lets everyone on the team unload. And by unloading, they are in a better place to engage in the work to be done. More open. Less preoccupied.

We may not get to everything on the list. We may not address everything. But we won't forget them either.

I head to the airport on Sunday to spend a few days with the team. We'll start with open items. I'm looking forward to it!

Some of my favorite prep questions:

• How are we doing? As a team? As a company?
• What decisions from last meeting didn’t get implemented?
• Are we on the right track?
• Do we have confidence in our strategy?
• What evidence shows we are implementing our strategy?
• What evidence shows our strategy is working?
• Where are we off track? Where are we spending time, talent, management attention, and capital on things that don’t make sense or aren’t aligned with our strategy?
• If you had to reduce your spend by 20%, what would you eliminate?
• If you had 20% more to spend how would you allocate it?
• SWOT: What are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Is there anything we want to do about these to further leverage, minimize, exploit, or defend them?
• If you were a startup in our category aiming to take our customers, what would you build? How would you organize the company? How would you take it to market?
• How well are our strategy and plans flowing down into the organization? How could we better align our teams with the decisions we make?
• If the future requires a small team who can build, deploy, and manage a fleet of AI agents, do we have the right people in the company to implement this? Do they have what they need to do this well?
• How exactly do we help our customers? What evidence of this is there?
• Who in our company deeply understands the life and times of our target customers? Are they in a position to and empowered to create and ship solutions to these customers?
• What needs to be said that is not being said?
• What is being said that we are not hearing? From our people? From our customers? From our investors? From our partners?

Credit to Jerry Colonna for those last two questions.

Try these. You don't have to wait for your next offsite.