Should You Try an 'Abandonment Retreat' This Year?

Although you're just wrapping up busy season and are involved with performance reviews, you should give some thought to what your firm will need to tackle in this year's summer retreat. Whether you hold it for partners only or include the entire firm, you can take the "housecleaning" opportunity that comes with each annual retreat to review and revise the old list of topics and approaches, particularly now with the changes in the market.

Where to start. The best way to begin cleaning house is to hold what strategic planning and organizational behavior experts Merianne Liteman and Sheila Campbell (Arlington, Va.; 703-575-8152; e-mail: partners@liteman-rosse.com or scampbell@ wildblueyonder.biz) call an Abandonment Retreat.

In their book, Retreats That Work: Designing and Conducting Offsites for Groups and Organizations (Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2003; Cost: $ 45), the authors suggest planning a retreat to address business-need management as defined by management guru Peter Drucker. His advice: Adopt a policy of "Organized Abandonment ... to put every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, and every customer and end-user on trial for its life."

"It sounds scary," says Campbell, "but an abandonment retreat simply means bringing representatives from all areas of your [firm] together offsite. Then, you put everything on the table, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those aspects of your operation that are holding your [firm] back-even if they worked for you in the past. Done properly, it is a powerful event that can set new and urgently needed directions for your [firm].".

Seven tips. A reevaluation of such magnitude is bound to trigger highly charged emotions, so plan the event carefully and take it slow and easy. The following suggestions from Liteman and Campbell can help you create a successful abandonment retreat:

1. Don't think in terms of a single meeting. A complex change often requires several offsite retreats and onsite meetings over a period of months. If you think of this as a multi-session process rather than discrete events, you can build on what you've developed and work to bring new participants up to speed. A series gives participants time between sessions to reflect on what has taken place, test new ideas, solicit input from colleagues who weren't present, and think about how best to contribute to the next session.

2. Make sure there's consensus on the firm's strategic direction. A broad consensus helps drive the hundreds of daily decisions that determine whether an organization will succeed, whereas a muddled strategy allows people to decide individually what's important, without having a context to guide them. Participants in an abandonment retreat must decide which way their firm is heading and what it is renouncing. A comprehensive dialogue will identify the activities that will get the firm to where it's going, as well as those that are marginal.

For instance, your firm may decide to abandon certain specialty services that have had a lackluster performance and instead choose new areas, place greater emphasis on core services, or restructure its practice groups.

3. Evaluate work processes. During abandonment retreats, participants examine work processes in terms of being a net asset or a net cost. They decide which processes define what the firm stands for to its clients and staff and also which processes are critical to the firm's success while not necessarily visible to an outsider. Once you've concluded this analysis, you can eliminate processes that no longer serve a purpose or create value for your firm.

Today, CPA firms are looking particularly closely at technology and how to improve on it, getting the most productivity from limited staff, and centralizing processes and information into knowledge bases.

4. Be prepared for resistance. By their very nature, abandonment retreats require people to surrender their comfort zones. Participants want to hold onto what's familiar, so the hardest thing is to let go. To deal with resistance:

* First, encourage resistance throughout the retreat. Repeatedly invite dissenting views and have the group sift through them.

* If you sense that people are reacting to a fear of loss, ask the whole group (not just those resisting the change) to identify what's important to them, what they want to keep. This will reassure the resisters that not everything they care about will vanish.

* If resistance asserts itself as the discussion is winding down and decisions are near, don't dismiss it as coming too late. Even at the eleventh-hour, resistance may be doing you a favor. Try to deal with all the participants' issues before they get back to the office and have a chance to derail what everyone has worked so hard to accomplish.

5. Encourage fresh thinking. Some participants will only let go of outmoded ways when they can see other possibilities. In an abandonment retreat, participants can use the "wide-open thinking" exercise detailed in Retreats That Work.

Here's how it works: Using as models high-caliber organizations (they can be CPA firms or organizations outside of the profession), participants work in silence and write ideas on note cards, one idea per note.

For example: To address how to increase training for junior staff, participants might suggest "Assign each junior person to a partner on a rotating basis to attend client meetings and calls" or "Bring in a consultant for quarterly sessions in leadership training." When participants run out of inspiration from the first organization on the list, they move on to another one, coming up with as many ideas as possible.

Next, in small groups, participants share their ideas and post them on flipcharts. Each group looks for the kernels of great ideas. This is a lively exercise that can be full of humor at the same time it helps participants uncover remarkable ideas for tackling longstanding problems.

6. Measure the impact of current activities against the resources they use. Have participants create a large matrix and plot each activity on it. First, the group lists the firm's available resources (e.g., staff, practice group budgets, office space, information technology, and brand recognition) and writes them on a flipchart labeled Resources.

The group next lists the kinds of impact the firm would like (e.g., more repeat clients, more frequent publication of articles, raised brand awareness, more and higher caliber job applicants) and records them on a flipchart labeled Impact. The group classifies each activity and posts results on a matrix divided into quadrants (see the figure, "Resources/Impact Matrix"). The results of this exercise become dramatically clear.

7. Recognize and remove obstacles to change. It's unfortunate if people see obstacles to change as insurmountable, both for themselves and for their firms. Deal with this before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Include time for members of the firm to explain the hurdles they foresee rising as change gets underway.

Try the obstacle-busters exercise in Retreats That Work: Participants come up with every obstacle they can think of to the changes they've decided are too difficult to launch. After identifying the obstacles they feel able to tackle, they choose at least six and decide what actions the people in the room can take to overcome them.

"What you're really doing in an abandonment retreat is looking closely at what you do and getting rid of what just doesn't work anymore," says Liteman. "Yes, you're spending some time focusing on what doesn't work, but when you eliminate that, you're left with what does." And then, she adds, you have a solid foundation on which to build a great future. In the end, the participants feel good about what they've done. It's like throwing away all the junk in the attic-you've lightened your load. "Best of all, your team is taking control and making the tough choices together. That's what controlling your own destiny is all about."
Resources/Impact Matrix

High Impact/Low Resource UsageHigh Impact/High Resource Usage
Winner: Represents high return on investment.Future potential: Needs assessment to see if high resource
is justified. May be workable if you can reduce cost deductions.

Low Impact/Low Resource UsageLow Impact/High Resource Usage
Small potatoes: Can the impact be increased?Abandon: Low return on investment
If not, abandon it, because it's probably a distraction.

(Source: Retreats That Work: Designing and Conducting Offsites for Groups and Organizations, by Merianne Liteman and Sheila Campbell)

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