When a good client calls me with a question like that, I really want to help them out of their jam. So we used open ended facilitation techniques to guide the early sessions of their Strategic Plan Review session: Open Space, Appreciative Enquiry and the Medicine Wheel. They sat in a circle with no tables or documents, really talking to each other, at a deep level. This process cannot be rushed, and some participants began to get nervous that we would run out of time.

As the group got closer to crunch time, on the third day, we switched to SWOT analysis and other linear...