Leaflet #111: How to plan a worthy, non-boondoggle retreat.

1. A test for choosing retreat activities 2. Planing hack: the behavior test 3. Planning hack: the phantom future retreat

A test for choosing retreat activities

There’s one big pressure test to make sure you’re planning the retreat as effectively as possible: you’re taking time out, you’re taking space out, you’re changing people’s work routine and workspace. We are all together with no interruptions, no outside world for this period of time. What is it that we’re able to do communication-wise with those different parameters that we could not do in our regular day-to-day work lives?

For a lot of people, this answer comes with exploring vulnerability and trust development. A huge advantage of people being in a shared mutual space with no social distractions is they learn to trust each other more. That usually comes from being more willing to express vulnerability—what they’re worried about, what they feel like they’re not strong in, giving each other feedback more easily.

That’s why there are often bonding and social components to the event. The best versions of that are not just “for fun,” but actually scaffold a level of trust and candor among people that you’d want to see extend to the work. The test for selecting retreat activities should be: is this building a behavior that would accelerate our work when we’re back in our regular context?

-ben

Retreat planning hack: Using the behavior test

A way I prefer to hack all these questions: if we pick a couple of people in the organization at different levels, how will they be behaving differently after the retreat than they did before in their day-to-day experience? What impact on daily behavior will this retreat have?

So for a senior researcher, the hope might be that their awareness and greater clarity on the priorities would guide their strategic choices—they could plausibly choose substantially different research projects over the coming months. For a junior researcher, the hope would be they’d be more able to dive into projects they’ve been given or taken on and feel more comfortable doing so. Or, if they think the projects are mistaken, push back and say so—rather than existing in a river of confusion or feeling like they must have missed something.

In other words, the clarity that people arrive at from this process of understanding and improving on the priorities turns them into priority-accelerating machines on a daily basis, as individual cells in a whole organism.

-ben

Retreat planning hack: using a phantom future retreat

The second hack I like to use in planning retreats is to think about retreat cadence as the driver. Start with a kind of phantom next retreat as your goalpost. Ask the question both of yourself in planning and of everybody else transparently while you’re there: when we return to a similar space like this six months from now and are celebrating what we have done, what are we literally celebrating?

The retreat unfolds in two parts: the objective you have for their learning, followed by the objective you have for their behavior, laying that all out, teaching that to them. And then planning at a high level: what is it that we did to bring that to fruition that we will celebrate at our next retreat? Really getting people to envision what that would look like makes more concrete the planning between now and then.

Now, what happens if you get on a kind of retreat high, make a whole bunch of plans that don’t necessarily make sense a few weeks from now? Or it’s clear you don’t really know—it could be this thing, it could be this thing, and none of these ideas feel big enough to commit to a plan?

The phrase that helps with this: instead of “at our next retreat, we’re going to be celebrating outcome A,” try “we’re going to be celebrating clarity on the question of X.” We will have made the choice among A, B, and C, or we will have gotten clarity as to which direction we’re going. We no longer have confusion about that.

-ben

COMPELLING QUOTATIONS

Economist and America’s most voracious reader Tyler Cowen on a skill worth developing:

If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway on cutting material from drafts:

Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

Writer and Calvinist Marilynne Robinson on the vagaries of selfhood:

There are times when selfhood feels like exasperating captivity, times when it feels alone with its ghosts, times when it feels confident in its particular resources, times when it is deeply disappointed with itself, distrustful of itself. Yet it is a constant in experience. And, within it, a history of life, a coherency of thought, a system of persisting loyalties, language, culture, habit, learnedness, even wisdom, accumulate and enrich themselves for all the world as if the self were a shelter from the storms of change. It isn’t, and it is. Vulnerable to influence of every kind, recidivist, intractable, through all its variations it is an indubitable presence. The wealth we can make of our capacities and perceptions we have entirely by grace of our selfhood. It is our part in the drama we all live out in this theater—of God’s glory, Calvin would say.