Section: Pulling it All Together: Action Planning Meetings

Creating a Seamless Story

Once all of the work team recommendations had been submitted and reviewed by the Steering Committee and all of the stakeholder engagement activities had been completed, our next task was to meet with the Senior Management Team to pull together all of the recommendations in a seamless story. We worked hard together to unify disparate formats and reconcile gaps and overlaps, but merging six plans into a single, coherent document turned out to be more work than we had anticipated. To this end, we held a series of meetings with the Senior Management Team in April. Descriptions of these meetings follow.

More about: Action Planning Meetings

Action Planning Meeting #1
The first action planning meeting with the Senior Management Team was a full-day retreat, from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, at an offsite location.

Action Planning Meeting #2
We held a three-hour follow-up meeting closely following the first action planning meeting.

Action Planning Meeting #3
The purpose of this meeting was to finalize the BHAG categorization and begin to map strategies over time.

Action Planning Meeting #4
Do a deep dive on each of the final BHAG categories and create a list of existing assets in the district as well as map the action steps within each over time.

key takeaways

  • End game
    At the beginning of the Action Planning meetings, define the "end game" that the process is driving toward, and emphasize that the messiness and ambiguity of the process is normal in change management efforts.
  • Stay flexible
    Create a structured facilitation process going in, but be prepared to adapt as needed. We re-calibrated our plan after it became evident in the first couple of meetings that more time for deeper conversation was necessary.