Create an Answer Gallery at Your Next Retreat
Creating an “Answer Gallery” is one of the easiest and most effective law firm retreat exercises I use — and as a bonus, it fits perfectly between sessions or at the beginning of the day as the attendees arrive.
The goal of the exercise is simple: to engage attendees and get them thinking about the topics of the day as they answer “big” questions anonymously.
Here’s how you do it:
- Post dozens of large, easel-sized post-it notes around the room.
- Write a single, open-ended question on the top of each one.
- Give each participant a Sharpie fine-point marker (regular pens make it hard for others to read the notes) and a 3×3 pad of colored post-it notes.
- Ask everyone to walk around the room and answer the questions on the small post-it notes and then stick their answers on the big question page.
- Photograph or transcribe all of the answers and share them with the group once the event is over.
And here’s what the final result can look like:
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Interesting! Can you provide some sample questions / topics that have engaged people? (And maybe some that haven’t worked so well.)
Jack, the key is to have open ended questions (like “if I ran this firm for a day, the first thing I’d do is …” and “Our biggest challenges in the next decade are …” or even “We’d be a more inclusive and diverse firm if we …”) that can be answered in just a few words on a post-it note. The exercise doesn’t work if you need the answers to be too long.