Board retreat
Zitec
„We want a playful facilitator. Could you help us?”
Florentina Greger, from the enquiry we received from the Zitec management team
- Team
- Board + management team
- Format
- Board retreat, two days
- Methods
- Facilitation, applied improvisation, working with metaphors, emotional culture workshop
The context
Zitec had worked with many facilitators and trainers before. For the board retreat they explicitly asked for something else: a playful approach instead of the familiar one. That business decision is what made the retreat possible — companies tend to pick the comfortable option, and what is new tends to sit right at the edge of the uncomfortable.
The approach
We mapped the year's challenges as metaphors — "dragons", "storms" — rather than as process failures. It is far easier to put a dragon on the table than a reproach, and a metaphor stays with a team long after the slide is closed. Creative exercises were in from the start, with the co-founders in the room. Along the way we proposed something that was not in the original brief: an emotional-culture workshop on day two. The team took it.
What stayed
When leaders are not afraid to draw a laugh or be vulnerable, a space of trust opens up where the team can discuss anything — including what it had been avoiding. The hard subjects of the year went up on the wall as workable metaphors, and the team left with a shared reading of them. The added workshop landed an idea that usually gets lost: how people feel is not a "soft" detail, it directly affects motivation, communication, and results.
Regional team offsite
Regional HR team, multinational company
- Team
- Regional HR team of a multinational
- Format
- Two-day offsite, Lake Balaton
- Methods
- Facilitation, applied improvisation, emotional culture, wellbeing workshop
The context
An HR team covering several countries, with people who were rarely in the same room. What they wanted was not one decision but four things at once: to know each other better, to connect, to agree on how to work together, and to work on the strategy for the period ahead.
The approach
Two days built as a combination rather than a module: facilitation for the strategy and ways-of-working part, applied improvisation for connection and for the team's reaction speed, emotional culture for how they talk about hard things, and a wellbeing workshop — relevant for an HR team that handles everyone else's wellbeing and rarely its own.
What stayed
The team connected and relaxed — which, for people who are rarely in the same room, is not a bonus but the condition for everything else to work. They left with a far clearer emotional culture, a business strategy for the next six months, and each with a personal wellbeing plan.
Management retreat
IPSOS Romania
- Participants
- 20 managers
- Duration
- 1.5 days
- Methods
- Applied improvisation, facilitation, the "Mountains" survival simulation, GSI questionnaire (Human Synergistics), graphic facilitation
The context
Six objectives on the table, all about how the team works rather than what it decides: developing teamwork skills, strengthening relationships between members, training empathy and the ability to see things from someone else's perspective, practising a solution-oriented mindset, understanding commitment and partnership as a team — and, explicitly, for people to enjoy themselves.
The approach
We opened with applied improvisation, so the team practised collaboration, trust, and listening rather than discussing them. Then facilitation, aimed at three outputs: the desired future, the available resources, and the next steps. On top of that, "Mountains" — a survival simulation that surfaces development areas, strengths, and the behaviours the team wants encouraged — and the GSI questionnaire from Human Synergistics as a measure. Everything said was captured on posters by a graphic facilitator, so the team left with a shared visual memory rather than individual notes.
What stayed
The team practised collaboration, empathy and problem solving, and came to see how much appreciating colleagues matters — something teams know in theory and rarely practise. The survival simulation and the GSI questionnaire surfaced the strengths and weaknesses in the team's behaviours. Then, through facilitation and graphic facilitation, they set a development plan for the team together.