Javier Velasco — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:13:34 GMT

Hi Austin,

I had asked Christina and Anders for some coaching on how to organize this, one of the keys was to try to let the hotel manage as much production as possible. I had the hotel handle the meals, the bus and even the trip to the nearby winery, since they all belong to the same holding.

Most of the things that went wrong or almost wrong were related to the problems of the culture in my country, my largest lesson would be “check everything twice”. Image how you would feel if they tell you the bus that you had reserved months ago is not booked, just the day before departure. Other problems were also related to incompetency by the hotel administration, we had some minor inconveniences in distributing the people in the rooms, and checkout was a pain.

Another thing that I didn’t like all that much was the fact that the presentations were over-developed for the retreat format, it felt more like a regular conference in a retreat disguise, the ideas weren’t really raw. I’d also suggest not to place tables in the room and try to avoid people from opening up their laptops, physical space configuration will have a great impact on the conversation. Lastly, managing the schedule can be a huge challenge, we had to fudge it every hour since there were more people lining up to talk and we didn’t want to leave anyone out.

Austin Govella — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:56:38 GMT

Javier,

In organizing the retreat, did you learn any lessons about things that worked well or that didn’t work at all?

Comments on Notes from the IA Retreat in Chile