Senior Management Team away day ideas

[SasherinSuite]

I need to organise an away day for the SMT as they desperately need to make some decisions about the direction of the organisation.

There will be 9 of them from different parts of the business (think Finance, Engineering, Maintenance, etc). I was thinking of dividing the day into 4/5 sessions covering a separate topic/issue/question.

Has anyone had any experience of running away days and have any suggestions about how to plan the day? No icebreakers please!

No experience of running one but experience of being a part of one.

It was two days actually and involved an overnight stay and a lot of alcohol. We did group exercises and one thing that was interesting was that the groups were mixed after a while to change the dynamic. This was good as another group then had to put up with the argumentative arse from IT...

Based on what I sat through, I'd say make it relevant to all. In other words, don't have a session based on the development of finance department, for example. have presentations and group work. Another thing I thought worked well was the facilitators were on hand to speak for groups if noone wanted to do this so there was no pressure.