Day 3 of the Alto Cayma Retreat

Whenever you have multi-day retreats or conferences, there is always a sense that there is more than "enough time." Time to meet your objectives, time to answer everyone's questions, and time to really teach or train the subject (or subjects) you have defiend for your work. Boy is that a false sense of security.

The night before our last day of the retreat, Ken and I realized that we had an agenda that could easily fill 12-hours of instruction and discussion - and a final day of meetings that was advertised to be less than 8 hours. The challenge for us was to focus our time and the information we discussed in order to maximize the materials we were sharing and presenting to the Mission of Alto Cayma Steering Committee. Boy - this was no easy task.

As our primary objective for the two-day Steering Committee retreat was to develop a core body of leaders within the Mission and to empower them toward a new level and mechanism of governance; we felt pretty secure in the work that we had accomplished in the first 2-days of the retreat. However, one of the other main objectives we had defined with Father Alex and Bruce Hazen in our curriculum was the structuring of a "Strategic Planning" document.

How do you develop an entire Strategic Planning process in just 8-hours (actually less than 8-hours, as lunch in Peru is often a 2-hour affair with an extended post-lunch break)?

Our approach was to focus on the basics. Essentially we took the foundational elements of any organizational design - forming, storming, norming and planning - and we expanded on these ideas as they related to the formation of a Steering Committee (Father Alex plans to call them a "Steering Board;" as there is a different connotation to the term Board in Peru). As such, our last day of training focused on helping this new group of leaders structure their ideas, concerns and issues into an agenda for their first meeting.

We are excited to think that a new model for vetting ideas, developing strategy and moving forward with programs and projects has been born out of this 3-days of meetings. Even more, we are humbled to have been a part of such an amazing experience with a fantastic group of really dedicated, very intelligent and extremely compassionate people.