Most of the work I perform with clients usually involves some form of workshop.  My preferred – and proven – format usually is for a multiday event.  Inevitably there is some degree of pushback when I recommend that we go for two, or even three days.

In most organisations people are used to half day sessions where they can quickly get back to the “important stuff, ” such as checking email and answering phone calls. If they do have an “off-site” event that goes for more than one day, it’s common for this to have a significant ‘team-building’ component that usually translates to mean ‘we’ll get some time playing golf’.

However there’s many reasons why you should hold multiday events.  Not least of which is that after a good sleep you are better equuipped to resolve problems.  Evidence of this is cited in a few places, such as New Scientist and the BBC.

Firstly, here’s the New Scientist take:

Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.

Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night’s sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in common – forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. “We’re not just stabilising memories during sleep,” says Stickgold. “We’re extracting the meaning.”

And, more recently, the BBC

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether “incubating” a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep – when most dreams occur – were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

“We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use”

While this is useful information to reinforce the need for multiday events – especially around innovation and strategy – it’s also got some unexpected benefits for office workers stuck in the tedium of a corporate job that bores them to tears.

Armed with the above findings, they can safely snooze at their desks, armed with the retort: “I was problem solving.”