As passionate people at work, we are constantly on stage and we never take enough time to practise. Our retreats are meant for practise and sharing experiences on a regular base in order to shrink the gap between where the level of our skills are and where we want it to be. There is no pressure to actually achieve visible results or initiate change, the only prerequisite is having fun while (co-)learning.
Our free offer to training / event organizers
It is our dream to have more and more people stepping on board of this type of (co-)learning and pick up their own facilitation and organisation of retreats. In order to achieve this we offer event organisers, training companies all around the world the opportunity to co-facilitate their first/second/… public retreat for FREE! By co-facilitating a retreat session we aim to train and engage others in the art of preparing and facilitating retreats so that they can organise their own. As we know from experience, preparing a decent retreat session is not a walk in the park and therefore we share all materials, preparations, scenarios and more to every person we co-facilitated a retreat session with. This way people can easily continue supporting our quest to change the world of learning without too much of an effort. Of course, we encourage people to contribute with their own session material but this is not a pre-requisite. So… if you are an event organiser, training organiser or member of a company organising learning events + you want to try this out in your country = contact us to get the experiment running! Similar to what is commonly known as Code Retreats by Corey Haines we started a couple of variations using a similar approach but a different domain. What retreat domains did we try and have/had running already…
Gamestorming Retreats
In February 2012 we started experimenting with what is currently known as “Gamestorming Retreats“. – see report of our first run ‘here’ – which became pretty popular within our Belgian community. More recently we got requests to facilitate these type of retreats inside companies in order to increase their innovative and creative potential using the right meeting facilitation techniques. As a side effect it has been reported that the companies’ meeting culture shifted to a more effective and fun use! –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company. More on our Gamestorming Retreats can be found ‘here‘.
Kanban Retreats
In April 2012 we started experimenting with “Kanban Retreats” – see report of our first run ‘here‘ – which was surprisingly tough for people to experiment with their learning on an organisational level. Recently we successfully used the same retreat technique to support a team in transition to use kanban as a tool to guide their change and improvements. It turned out to become a good tool for in-company and context sensitive learning. –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company.
Leadership Retreats
This is a special case as we started this type of retreats in September 2011 under a different name: “Coaching Retreat” – see report of our first run ‘here‘ – which we renamed to “Leadership Retreats” according to the feedback we got from attendees and other community members. – see report of our first re-named run ‘here‘ – Up until now we did not use this type of learning for in-company purposes but we are convinced it would be a good method to keep (line) managers in sync and improving. Then again we did use the results and the concept of the first release for our ALE2012 Conference session – Perfect Problem Breakthrough. –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company. More on Leadership Retreats can be found ‘here‘.
Testing Retreats
Our newest experiment is to use the retreat concepts within the testing domain and thus start a series of “Testing Retreats” of which our first run is scheduled at Oktober 20th. Stay tuned for experience reports coming from this one as our free tickets are flying out of the door already. We expect this one to go: “sold out”. –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company. More on Testing Retreats can be found ‘here‘.
Startup Retreats
Something we do together with our partner for the Belgian startup and entrepreneur community is what we call the “iStart Coaching Retreats” and is based on similar principles as all the above but focused on the needs of entrepreneurs with a startup company. – see report of our first run ‘here‘ – participation for the ones we do in Belgium is managed by IBBT Entrepreneurship and this event is organized every last friday of the month. –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company or if you want to join this retreat, we can try to get you in but it will require you to connect with IBBT Entrepreneurship somehow.
Craftsmanship…
And of course we still do and will keep on facilitating Code & LegacyCode Retreats!!! But those do not need further elaboration and are known worldwide to practise really good craftsmanship techniques. –> Contact us if you want this to happen at your company. More on Code Retreats can be found ‘here‘. More on Legacy Code Retreats can be found ‘here‘.
Feedback
We are sure that many other options are available but this is what we tried so far and we will try and experiment with others in the future. If you have any ideas, thoughts or feedback on this do not hesitate to let us know. We do appreciate our customers and like to listen to them. Thanks for your time and see you soon.