Every January — or September, for the fiscally late — companies across the continent load their leadership teams into rental cars, drive 45 minutes from the office, and check into a business hotel with a spa nobody will use and a conference room with chairs that become ergonomically hostile by 11am. There, over two days and an open bar that opens suspiciously early, they will make decisions that look exactly like the decisions they made last year. This is the annual strategy offsite. It is theater, but expensive theater, and everyone has agreed not to say so out loud.
The Ritual of Departure
The offsite must happen away from the office. This is non-negotiable and also completely irrational. The logic: if we leave the office, we’ll think differently, escape the day-to-day, have space to be strategic. In practice, everyone checks their email during the breaks, the same political dynamics that exist in the office follow you to the hotel, and the “space to think” mostly produces the same thoughts you had at your desk, but now with a view of a golf course. What the offsite actually provides is a ritually demarcated time during which strategic conversation is permitted. You could have that conversation in the office. You don’t, because the office is for operational things and strategy would feel presumptuous. The hotel conference room creates the fiction of a strategic moment. That fiction is perhaps worth something. Perhaps.
The Pre-Work Nobody Does
Every offsite begins with pre-work: slides to review, a survey to complete, articles to read, a framework to familiarize yourself with. Sent out two weeks in advance. Eighty percent of attendees arrive having done none of it. The remaining twenty percent did it on the train. One person read everything, prepared questions, and will leave deeply disappointed when those questions go unanswered because the agenda runs long. The facilitator — external, because internal people would be “too close to it” — spends the first two hours explaining what was in the pre-work. By midday, you’re doing an exercise where each team writes their three strategic priorities on post-its. There are forty-seven post-its. They say roughly the same five things in slightly different words. This is called “alignment.” You photograph the wall. The photo will live in a shared folder and be opened once, by the person who took it, to confirm it uploaded correctly.
Why the Conclusions Are Always the Same
The output of the strategy offsite is generally: things the company was already doing, now officially elevated to “strategic”; one new initiative that sounds transformative and will be quietly deprioritized by Q2; and a commitment to “better cross-functional collaboration” that everyone agrees with and nobody defines. This is not because the people in the room are incapable. Strategy is constrained by reality — by existing resources, existing customers, existing market position — and two days in a hotel don’t change reality. You leave with a new framework, a new set of pillars, a new visual metaphor for your strategic roadmap (this year it’s a flywheel; last year it was a pyramid), and functionally the same direction you had when you arrived. The Spreadsheet Sloth on your laptop sticker understands. It’s seen the Q3 review. It knows where “bold new initiatives” go to die.
The One Thing Offsites Are Actually Good For
Here’s what the offsite does accomplish, and it’s not nothing: it creates a shared moment. For two days, the leadership team is in the same room, eating the same mediocre buffet, enduring the same icebreaker about personal values. That shared discomfort builds solidarity. The informal conversations during coffee breaks — where the real strategy happens — are genuinely valuable. The after-dinner drinks, where someone finally says what they’ve been thinking for six months, occasionally change things. The offsite as a social ritual has merit. The offsite as a strategic tool is largely performative. Own that distinction, plan accordingly, and maybe don’t spend €15,000 on a hotel for what is essentially a team lunch that takes two days.
Same strategy, new lanyards. Some things never change — but at least your mug can tell the truth. nobriefsclub.com/shop
