What will your team need to hear in 2027?
Every business has them. The kick-off in February. The conference in May. The mid-year reset when the plan meets reality. The offsite where leaders are meant to come back with fresh eyes. The planning day where next year starts taking shape.
They take months to organise and cost a small fortune in time, travel and catering. Yet the question that matters most often gets the least attention: what will your people think, feel and do differently when they walk out?
Too many of these moments follow a familiar script. Results. Targets. A SWOT that looks suspiciously like the last one. Everyone nods, everyone agrees, and the business carries on with the same playbook and a fresh coat of paint. Meanwhile, customers have moved on. Again.
Your customer won't wait for your next strategy day
Customers are asking AI to shop for them, walking away from loyalty programmes that stopped feeling like a reward, and changing their expectations faster than most retailers change their promotional calendar. Walking the stores in Shenzhen and Shanghai this year, I watched retail move at a pace that makes a three-year roadmap look charmingly vintage. Do you know you can open a store in 3 months in China from idea to opening event!
That pace isn't slowing in 2027. Which means a once-a-year dose of fresh thinking probably isn't enough.
Five questions to ask as you plan the year
What are we assuming about our customer that we haven't tested in two years?
Where are we confusing activity with progress?
What would a competitor who didn't exist two years ago do with our customers?
Is our team challenged, or just comfortable?
What's the one conversation we keep avoiding?
Ask them at the start of the year, and again halfway through. The answers have a habit of changing.
Provocation and inspiration aren't opposites
Teams need both. Provocation without inspiration leaves people rattled and defensive. Inspiration without provocation is a lovely morning that changes nothing. The sessions that shift a business do both: they unsettle the assumptions, then give people the energy and a practical path to act.
That's the work I do through Juanita Speaks. It's built on more than 30 years in retail, from the shop floor to the C-suite at Woolworths, The Warehouse Group and Noel Leeming, and sharpened every day at RX Group, where the thinking has to survive contact with a real P&L. I've worked alongside brands including Spark, Google, AWS, Burger King and Honda, and sit on the various advisory boards both in NZ and abroad. Which means the view I bring isn't just from New Zealand. It's what's working, and what's about to, around the world.
Four ways to bring it into your year
Shakeout sessions. Before you lock a plan, or when it's halfway through and wobbling, shake it. A focused session with your leadership team that pressure-tests assumptions, surfaces blind spots and gets the uncomfortable conversations on the table while they're still cheap to have.
Workshops. Hands-on and built around your business. Customer-led transformation, experience as a growth driver, AI in retail (what's actually working, not what's trending on LinkedIn), and what APAC retail is telling us about what's coming next.
Keynotes. For conferences, kick-offs and offsites where you want the room energised and thinking differently. The future of retail, leading through disruption, and why the customer is still the answer to everything, delivered with plenty of energy and zero corporate wallpaper.
Retail safaris. Sometimes the best provocation is seeing it for yourself. Through Juanita Speaks and RX Group, I lead retail safaris and executive study tours across Australia, APAC, China, South Korea. Japan and the USA, taking leadership teams into the stores, formats and ideas that are reshaping retail, then helping them work out what it means back home. Nothing shifts a team's thinking quite like standing in the future and realising it's already open for business.
Plan the moments, not just the venues
The 2027 calendar is already taking shape, and the best sessions are designed around what a team needs at that point in the year, not dropped in at the last minute. Whether your big moment is in February or November, let's talk early and build something that lands.
About Juanita Speaks
Juanita Speaks is the keynote and thought leadership platform of Juanita Neville-Te Rito, one of Australasia's leading retail and customer experience voices. Juanita delivers keynotes, workshops and shakeout sessions, and leads retail safaris with RX Group, for organisations across New Zealand, Australia and internationally.
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