It reads your company first
Your website, what is on the public record, and any document you hand it. Your own numbers and your customers’ own words come back to you to confirm or correct before anyone else sees them.
Back to all of Throughline
Everything Throughline does, stage by stage.
A decision has a life. It is needed, framed, argued, made and owned, turned into each team’s work, worked, adjusted when reality moves, and carried into the next one. Most tools cover one stage of that life. Here is what Throughline does at each of the eight.
What's coming up?
When is it?
Which month?
Who's working on it?
01 A call is needed
Something forces the question.
A miss, a threat, a new team, a plan that keeps failing, or simply the calendar. Throughline starts where the pressure is rather than with a blank agenda.
And what is moving around you
A competitor move, a rule change, a shift in the market or the technology, tied to the priority it threatens.
02 It is framed
The question gets written down, and the day is built around it.
Most retreats open by arguing about what the retreat is for. This one opens knowing.
The memo
It starts with the one call your day has to make.
A short interview about the decision, and what comes back is a one-page memo: the call, why now, what is at stake. Every line shows where it came from, so you can argue with it before anyone else reads it.
The agenda
A running order built for that call, not a template.
Your day is composed, not improvised: it is built to land the call in the memo, in an order that gets there. Drag it, retime it, cut it, or say in plain words what you want changed.
Half a day to two days, in person, remote or mixed.
Built on methods that already work
Your day runs on ways of working that have earned their place over decades, cut down to what your decision actually needs.
Yours to take away
One PDF with the agenda, the read and the questions. Keep it and run the day anywhere, even if you never come back.
03 It is argued
The disagreement happens in the open, before it costs you a quarter.
Teams rarely fail to agree. They fail to say what they think, and the day discovers it too late.
The three reads
Ask the team, the company and the customers first.
Two minutes on any device, before the day. Your leadership team answers the hard questions, everyone else gets a short pulse, and your customers get a survey that never mentions the retreat. The answers revise the agenda, and you approve every change.
You answer first, so you can see where your read and your team’s differ. Where what they say and what they describe do not match, the day works on that.
The wall
One screen the room follows, one device each.
Everyone joins with a code from whatever they have: phone, laptop or tablet, no app and no login. Nobody sees another answer until everyone has answered.
Everyone answers first
People write before anyone speaks, and nobody sees another answer until all are in. The loudest voice stops setting the room, and the quiet people are in the record.
Ranked, not lobbied
The room ranks things without a show of hands. What comes top is what the room chose, not what the last speaker pushed.
The facilitator’s own screen
What is next, who has answered, and the controls to retime or skip. You run the day without being its stopwatch.
04 It is made and owned
A call, with a name and a date on it.
And with the condition that would reopen it, so a decision can be revisited on purpose instead of drifting back by accident.
The record
Every decision with a name, a date and what would reopen it.
The facilitator records what the room agreed in the room’s own words. Anything the day raised but did not settle is caught too, and becomes a risk, an action, a measure or a rule before anyone goes home.
The write-up is already done
The record is complete when the room empties. No weekend spent turning photos of a whiteboard into a document.
The day people remember
Photos and thank-yous become a page that plays back as a reel, and the thank-yous stay on people’s records.
05 It is translated
Every team turns it into their own part.
This is where most decisions quietly die: between the room and the people who have to act on them.
The plan
The plan is drafted, you review and approve.
The decisions become a plan: the year’s goal, the priorities under it, the actions under those, each with an owner and a date. Numbers named on the day walk out as measures, with the day as their baseline.
One plan, not twelve readings of it
Each team’s priorities and measures hang off the ones above them, so the company is running one plan rather than several that happen to share words.
Bigger work becomes a project
A priority that needs more than a few actions runs as a project, still tied to the decision it serves. Nothing runs that the plan never asked for.
See how it worksOutside help, inside the plan
A coach or a vendor picks up their piece without joining the payroll, and sees their part rather than your whole plan.
In your words
Priorities, objectives, rocks: the plan uses whatever your company already calls them, so nobody has to learn new vocabulary.
06 It is worked
The work happens, and you can see it happening.
Check-ins from the inbox
Each owner is asked about their own work on a rhythm they agreed to. One click, no login, no status meeting.
Numbers that say whether you will arrive
Each measure is judged on whether it is going to get where it promised, not on how busy the week felt.
See how it worksMeetings that end with owners
The meetings between retreats are where a decision quietly changes shape. Here each one ends with names and dates, and the follow-through starts in the room.
See how it worksDeals that move the number
Every deal points at the measure it is meant to lift, so sales stops being a separate story from the strategy.
See how it worksOne queue of what needs you
Approvals, updates due, decisions waiting on a name, and nothing else. You hear when something needs you, not every time something happens.
07 It is adjusted
Reality moves. The plan moves with it, in front of you.
Slipping shows up by itself
You hear about a priority that has stopped moving in week three, not at the quarterly review. Silence counts as a signal, never as consent.
A correction, proposed
When the ground shifts, Throughline drafts the course correction for you. Somebody still has to agree to it, so the plan never changes behind your back.
Follow-through all year
From the day the plan goes live to the day of the next retreat, Throughline keeps reporting back on how it is holding up: what moved, what slipped, and what needs you.
08 It is carried
The reasoning outlives the people who made it.
People join, leave and change roles. The plan carries on, and whoever arrives next can start contributing straight away instead of spending a quarter working out why anything was decided.
Decisions keep their why
Each one carries the call, the owner, the date and what would reopen it. When somebody joins, leaves or hands over, the reasoning is still there.
Documents that know what they rest on
A page tells you when something it was written from has changed, instead of quietly going out of date while people still work from it.
Who can actually do the work
What people can do is read from work they delivered, not from a form they filled in. You staff the plan on evidence, and a departure is a gap you can see rather than one you discover.
See how it worksThe how-to sits on the work
Each job carries its own steps, so somebody new can pick it up on their first week. Steps can be marked for a person or handed to an AI agent.
Credit that stays with the person
Thanks are tied to a real outcome and kept on the person’s record, so good work is visible past their own manager, and worth credits they can spend.
Every retreat, side by side
Each day’s decisions, reads, agenda and record are kept with the templates the next one starts from. You can see what actually changed between one year and the next.
Also here
Everything else the work needs, in one place.
Your plan does not live on its own. The people, the permissions, the numbers coming in and the small things all sit beside it, so nothing has to be copied between tools and nothing falls into the gap.
- To-dos The small things stay attached to the work, not in somebody’s notebook.
- Board reporting The pack is written as you go. Nobody loses a week to building it.
- Roles and privacy People see what they should, and nothing is edited underneath you.
- Integrations Your numbers arrive on their own: QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot, Linear, Asana, Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook and your calendar.
- Library Frameworks, templates and past retreats are where the next one starts.
- Notifications You hear when it matters, so the alerts stay worth reading.
- Your structure Change a reporting line once and the plan follows it.
The charter
Four promises Throughline does not break.
Anonymous means anonymous
What your team writes is hidden from everyone. That includes you.
You approve every change
Answers from your team can change the day and the plan. Nothing changes until you say so.
The recording leaves when you do
Recording is optional, anyone in the room can ask for the mic off, and it is deleted once your plan is written.
The work is yours to take
Download the agenda, the decisions and the plan whenever you want, whether you have paid or not.
What the day is for.
One agenda does not fit every day. An annual planning day and a post-merger day need different methods and different questions, so each occasion composes its own day.
Leadership retreat
A day away for the leadership team that ends in decisions, not a good mood.
Annual planning retreat
The biggest calls usually get the last hour. Here next year leaves the room with an owner and a date on every priority.
Board retreat
The board arrives prepared and leaves with a decision, not another deck.
Strategy reset
A day for when the plan no longer matches what is really happening.
New leadership team alignment
A new leader or a reshaped team, getting to one shared plan.
Post-merger integration
Two companies with two plans agree one direction, together.
The science
Why a day is shaped the way it is.
None of this is invented here. It rests on the research into how organizations decide, align and follow through: why strategy stalls between the decision and the work, why a decision without an owner does not survive contact with a quarter, why a number has to be watched as it moves rather than at the end, and why a team that will not disagree in the room disagrees in the corridor instead.
What’s coming up?
When is it?
Which month?
Who's working on it?