by Ber | May 2, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
It begins, as most corporate innovations do, with good intentions and zero self-awareness. Someone — probably in a role that contains the word “alignment” — decides that the big meeting would go better if people were prepared. That feedback would be more productive if stakeholders knew what was coming. That the presentation would land better if key decision-makers had already seen it.
So they schedule a pre-meeting. A small meeting, just to set context, just fifteen minutes, before the real meeting. And somewhere in the bowels of a Google Calendar invite, a monster is born.
The pre-meeting is now, in many marketing departments, a standard line item in the project lifecycle. Not a symptom. A process. An institution. And if you think that’s alarming, wait until you hear about the pre-pre-meeting that someone scheduled to prepare for the pre-meeting.
The Bureaucracy That Launders Itself as Efficiency
There is a particular genius to the pre-meeting, which is that it sounds like the opposite of what it is. It sounds like preparation. It sounds like care. It sounds like the kind of thoughtful professional behavior that results in shorter, more productive main meetings.
In practice, it often results in two meetings instead of one, with identical attendees, covering 80% of the same material, after which the main meeting still runs long because somebody who wasn’t in the pre-meeting has questions that nobody anticipated.
The pre-meeting doesn’t make meetings more efficient. It multiplies them while making each one feel legitimate. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of buying a second freezer to store the food you bought at the supermarket because your first freezer was full of food you’d already bought at the supermarket.
The underlying problem — too many people with sign-off power, decisions made by committee, a culture where nobody wants to be surprised — doesn’t get solved. It gets managed. With a calendar invite.
Anatomy of a Pre-Meeting
Let’s walk through what actually happens in a typical marketing pre-meeting, so we’re all clear on what we’re defending when we schedule one.
0:00 — 0:05: Logistics and Pleasantries. Someone is late. Someone can’t share their screen. The first five minutes are identical to the first five minutes of every meeting ever held since video conferencing was invented.
0:05 — 0:15: Re-explaining context that was in the invite. The deck is opened. The agenda is reviewed. Someone asks why [Person X] isn’t on the call. “Oh, they’re the one we’re preparing for, they’ll be in the main meeting.” OK. Proceed.
0:15 — 0:30: The actual prep work. This is the functional part. The creative team walks through the work. Questions get asked. Some are answered. Some reveal that the work needs adjusting before the main meeting. This part is, genuinely, useful.
0:30 — 0:45: The pre-alignment alignment. Someone says “I just want to make sure we’re aligned on how we’re going to present this.” What follows is a negotiation about narrative, framing, who will speak to which slide, and whether the case studies should come before or after the strategy section. This is also, somehow, the main meeting, just without the person who needs to approve it.
0:45 — 1:00: Scheduling the follow-up. The pre-meeting ends. Someone says “great, I think we’re in good shape.” Someone else says “should we grab five minutes before the call to sync?” The ouroboros eats itself.
Who Benefits from the Pre-Meeting?
Not a trick question. Some people genuinely benefit from them, and understanding why helps explain why they persist despite being demonstrably inefficient.
Account managers benefit. The pre-meeting lets them brief the creative team on client sensitivities without the client in the room. It’s a legitimate professional need. The problem is that this sensitivity briefing could, in most cases, be a two-paragraph email. But that requires writing, and writing requires clarity, and clarity requires having actually thought through what you’re trying to say.
Nervous presenters benefit. Rehearsal is valuable. Walking through your deck before the main event, getting real-time feedback, is useful — particularly for junior team members. The problem is that this could be called “a rehearsal” and treated as such, rather than dressed up as an alignment meeting with a full stakeholder list.
People who are frightened of conflict benefit. The pre-meeting is, among other things, a tool for managing up. If you can get tacit approval from one influential person before the main meeting, you arrive with a coalition. This is politically rational. It is also a sign that your meeting culture is broken in ways that no number of pre-meetings will fix. The communications committee thanks you for your service.
The Cascade: When Pre-Meetings Breed
The truly frightening thing about pre-meeting culture is its reproductive capacity. One pre-meeting is a preparation tool. Two is a pattern. Three is a system. And systems, once established, are almost impossible to dismantle without a political incident.
In mature pre-meeting cultures, the hierarchy is complete: there is the main meeting (executive presentation), the pre-meeting (director-level prep), the pre-pre-meeting (team-level review), and occasionally a “quick sync” that someone schedules the morning of, just to make sure nothing has changed since yesterday.
The work — the actual creative, strategic, or analytical work — gets done in the cracks between these meetings, usually at night or over lunch, by the people who have been in meetings all day discussing the work they haven’t had time to do. This is what the kickoff meeting that should have been an email eventually evolves into when left unchecked.
The Spreadsheet Sloth knows this feeling. It’s the look on the face of someone who has spent four hours in meetings about a campaign that took two hours to create. It’s a very specific kind of tired.
What to Do Instead (A Modest Proposal)
The answer is not “never prepare for meetings.” Preparation is good. The answer is to be honest about what a pre-meeting actually is, and to choose the most efficient format for the outcome you need.
If you need stakeholder buy-in before a presentation, call the stakeholder. One call. Ten minutes. Ask the specific question: “Are there any concerns I should address before Thursday?” This is not a meeting. This is a phone call. They are different things.
If you need to rehearse a presentation, schedule a rehearsal. Call it a rehearsal. Invite only the people who are presenting. Treat it like a dress rehearsal, which means going through it once, identifying problems, fixing them, not spiralling into forty minutes of slide-order debate.
If you need team alignment on messaging, write it down. A brief. A one-pager. A shared document with three bullet points. Something that people can read asynchronously, annotate, and respond to on their own time — rather than consuming a collective hour to arrive at the same three points verbally.
And if none of those work — if the culture of your organisation is such that nothing gets done without a meeting — then you have a different problem. One that no amount of annual strategy deck iteration is going to solve. One that requires, at minimum, a meeting about the meetings.
Schedule it for thirty minutes. You’ll probably need a pre-meeting to prepare.
In the meantime, visit NoBriefs Club for tools and gear designed by and for the people who have been in more meetings than they’ve had hot lunches. We can’t give you those hours back. But we can make the next kickoff slightly more bearable.
Come prepared
Print a card before the next one: Meeting Bingo, five decks and a new grid on every click. Five in a row and you are allowed to leave. You will not be allowed to leave.
by Ber | May 1, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
Somewhere around 2018, a senior marketing leader at a large consumer brand stood in a conference room and said words to the effect of: “Why are we paying an agency to understand us when we could hire people who already understand us?” The logic was clean. The savings projection was convincing. The internal creative team was approved. Five years later, that brand has a twenty-person in-house studio, a head of creative operations, a Figma license that costs approximately what a small agency retainer used to cost, and a growing suspicion that the people who “already understand us” also, exclusively, think about us — which is either an asset or the world’s most expensive blind spot, depending on which quarter you’re reviewing. The in-housing revolution is real. Like most revolutions, the results are complicated.
The Numbers That Started the Conversation
The data driving the in-housing trend is not fabricated. In-house teams are, in many documented cases, faster at executing certain categories of work. They are less expensive per unit for high-volume, repeat-format content. They eliminate the briefing overhead, the relationship management overhead, the overhead of explaining your brand architecture to someone who is learning it while billing for the education. For brands producing large quantities of digital, social, and performance-oriented content, the financial case for internalising production is often solid. This is not an argument about ideology; it is arithmetic.
The Association of National Advertisers has been tracking in-house agency adoption for over a decade, and the numbers moved substantially in the latter half of the 2010s. By the early 2020s, the majority of large US advertisers had some form of in-house creative capability. What the headline figures tend to obscure is the enormous variation in what “in-house agency” means in practice — the difference between a three-person content team shooting product videos and a full-service internal creative department with strategy, creative direction, production, and media planning. These are very different operations with very different capability profiles, but they are counted the same way in the surveys that get presented at industry conferences.
What In-House Teams Are Good At (And What They’re Not)
In-house creative teams tend to excel at speed, consistency, and volume. They know the brand intimately, which means they don’t need the first three weeks of an engagement to understand the territory. They respond quickly because internal clients are the only clients. They maintain visual and tonal consistency across high-volume output because they are working from the same brand system, every day, without the drift that comes from briefing an external team that is also working on twelve other accounts. For brands whose primary creative need is “more of what we already do, faster and cheaper,” the in-house model delivers.
Where in-house teams structurally struggle — and where the most honest internal creative directors will quietly confirm this over a coffee — is in producing work that challenges the brand’s existing assumptions. External agencies bring something that sounds abstract and is actually quite specific: they have worked with other clients. They have seen what has happened in adjacent categories. They carry reference points, provocations, and occasionally uncomfortable comparisons that in-house teams are institutionally prevented from making. The person who is embedded in the organisation, whose performance review is conducted by the CMO, whose career progression depends on not embarrassing their employer, is not optimally positioned to tell the CMO that the brief is wrong. This is not a character failing. It is an incentive structure.
The briefs that produce genuinely surprising, category-defining work tend to come from a productive tension between internal knowledge and external perspective. The creative brief works best when it is written by someone who knows the business deeply and interpreted by someone who is not afraid of the business. In-house teams collapse that distance by design. Sometimes that efficiency is exactly what’s needed. Sometimes it’s how a brand spends three years producing content that is correct but not interesting.
What This Means for Agencies (And Whether They’re Paying Attention)
The agency response to in-housing has passed through several stages. Stage one was denial: in-housing is a fad, clients will come back when they realise quality suffers. Stage two was repositioning: agencies began marketing themselves as “consultants” who supplement rather than replace internal teams, a framing that is strategically sensible and also slightly desperate. Stage three — where the more thoughtful agencies currently reside — is genuine reinvention: accepting that the production work has largely moved in-house and competing specifically on the things in-house teams cannot easily replicate.
What that looks like in practice is agencies leaning harder into creative leadership rather than creative execution: conceptual strategy, campaign direction, the kind of work that requires diverse reference points and productive distance from the client’s own thinking. It is also pushing agencies toward specialisation. The generalist agency that did everything from brand strategy to social content to events is under structural pressure from both ends — in-house teams taking the execution and specialist consultancies taking the strategy. The middle is the uncomfortable place to be, which is the same observation you can make about where creative professionals sit on the spectrum between freelance and agency at any given point in their career.
The Hidden Costs They Didn’t Put in the Deck
The cost-saving projections that drive in-housing decisions tend to be accurate about direct costs and less thorough about indirect ones. Building an in-house creative team means building an HR function to manage creative people, who have specific hiring, retention, and management requirements that differ from those of the general corporate workforce. It means building a resourcing model that can absorb peak demand without overstaffing for steady-state periods. It means creating career paths for creative directors who, in an agency, would have a clear trajectory through the hierarchy; in a corporate environment, the ceiling arrives earlier and the options are narrower.
Turnover in in-house teams tends to be higher than projected, for reasons that creative professionals understand intuitively even if finance departments are surprised by them. The work is often more repetitive. The portfolio is narrower. The sense of creative community — the culture of making and critiquing and learning that functions as a retention mechanism in agencies — is harder to reproduce inside a brand. The creatives who are excellent tend to leave for external roles once they have the internal brand experience on their resume, and the ones who stay tend to be, over time, the ones who were least likely to challenge assumptions in the first place. This is a generalisation and it is also a pattern documented by enough in-house creative leads to take seriously.
None of this means the in-house model is wrong. It means the financial models that justify it are often optimistic about costs that are real and difficult to quantify. The work that gets done to justify the decision is, in its own way, a perfect example of the kind of strategic document that looks coherent and whose assumptions only get tested once the money is spent. If you have spent any time with annual strategy decks, you already know the feeling.
The Future Probably Has Both
The binary — in-house versus external agency — is already beginning to dissolve into something more complicated and ultimately more interesting. The brands doing it well tend to operate hybrid models: in-house teams handling volume, consistency, and brand stewardship; external partners brought in for transformation moments, campaign launches, and the kind of work that requires perspective that institutional proximity cannot provide. The distinction is not about quality. It is about what the work is trying to do.
For agencies, the sustainable future is in being genuinely useful for the things that are hard to internalise: cultural relevance, creative risk, outside-in perspective. This is a smaller market than the one agencies occupied when they owned execution as well as ideas. It is also a more honest one. For in-house teams, the challenge is maintaining creative ambition inside structures that reward safety. For the industry as a whole, the question is whether the work gets better or just cheaper — and whether, a decade from now, anyone will be able to tell the difference.
Some of us will. We always could.
Whether you’re building an in-house team, running an agency that’s losing clients to one, or just a creative trying to figure out where you fit in an industry that keeps reorganising itself — the Insurgency Journal is here. And if you need a wearable expression of your professional complexity, the NoBriefs shop has something that fits. Literally.
by Ber | Apr 14, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
The Account Manager Who Protects No One: A Field Guide to Agency’s Most Misunderstood Role
There is a person in every agency whose job title suggests they manage accounts but whose actual function, studied carefully from the inside, appears to be the careful management of blame. They sit between the client and the creative team with the stated purpose of facilitating communication and the actual purpose of ensuring that when things go wrong — and things always go wrong — the fault lands somewhere that isn’t them. This person is the account manager. This is their honest profile.
The Origin Story Nobody Tells at Onboarding
Account management was invented to solve a real problem: creatives are not always gifted at client relations, and clients are not always gifted at briefing. Someone needed to stand in the middle, translate between the language of feelings and the language of invoices, and make the whole dysfunctional system function. A noble purpose. A genuine need.
What happened next was the classic institutional drift that turns good intentions into bureaucratic theater. The account manager, originally a bridge, gradually became a toll booth. And like all toll booths, their primary function became collecting — collecting information going one way, collecting complaints going the other, collecting credit when the work landed well and mysteriously being elsewhere when it didn’t.
The modern account manager, in the majority of mid-to-large agencies, has evolved into something for which there is no flattering description: a professional redirector of expectations. They promise the client things the creative team hasn’t agreed to. They promise the creative team things the client hasn’t approved. They write emails with the words “let me check on that” and then forget to check on that. They schedule status calls that could be emails that could be nothing.
This is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. And it is worth understanding exactly why before we assign individual guilt.
The Impossible Job Description
Here is the core problem with account management as practiced in most agencies: the account manager is evaluated on client satisfaction and billed hours, which creates an incentive system that rewards promising things and penalizes pushing back. A good account manager — the kind who genuinely protects the creative process — is one who occasionally tells a client “no” or “not yet” or “that’s not possible in this timeline without consequences.” But saying no doesn’t make clients happy. And unhappy clients write emails to the agency director. And the agency director has a Q4 revenue target.
So the incentives are precisely backwards. The account manager who overpromises and underdelivers but keeps the client warm through the whole catastrophe is more valued — structurally, systemically — than the one who sets hard limits and delivers exactly what was promised. This is why scope creep almost always originates in an account conversation, not a creative one. The creative team didn’t add three more deliverables to the project. Someone promised them.
The creative team receives the downstream consequences of every overpromise. The account manager said the deck would have six different concept directions. The timeline is four days. The brief — which, as we know, nobody reads anyway — is two pages of contradictions and one very confident company logo. And the creative director is supposed to make magic out of this while the account manager is on a call with the client talking about “the exciting directions we’re exploring.”
Under the Bus: A Topography
Every creative professional who has spent more than six months in an agency environment has experienced the specific sensation of being thrown under a bus by an account manager. It has distinctive qualities. It happens in slow motion. You watch it coming and cannot stop it.
The typical sequence: the client is unhappy with the work. The work is unhappy because the brief was wrong, the timeline was impossible, or the client changed their mind between briefing and delivery — a change that was communicated to the account manager but not to the creative team. In the client meeting, the account manager says some version of “the team went in a direction that I think we can all agree needs refinement.” The team. A direction. Needs refinement. Three phrases, each one a small, well-placed knife, each one placing the blame exactly where it didn’t originate.
What the account manager does not say: “I gave the team a brief that had three contradictory objectives.” “I approved the direction in an internal review last Tuesday.” “The client changed the target demographic six days into a ten-day project and I didn’t tell anyone.” These are things that actually happened. They are not things that get said in client meetings. They are the negative space of every agency retrospective that never takes place.
This is not unique to advertising. Every industry has its version of the person whose job is to stand between pressure and production. But advertising has made it into an art form because advertising’s entire economy depends on relationships, and relationships are managed by account managers, and account managers have learned that preserving the relationship sometimes means sacrificing the people who do the actual work. KPI Shark was not built for the account team. It was built for the people who have to explain why a KPI was missed because a deliverable was added in week three of a two-week project.
The Good Ones Exist (But Are Outnumbered)
It would be dishonest to pretend the role is uniformly terrible or that every account manager is a blame-routing machine in a nice blazer. There are account managers — you’ve probably worked with one, maybe two in your career — who operate with a different philosophy entirely.
The good ones are distinguished by a simple characteristic: they tell the truth to both sides, even when the truth is uncomfortable. They tell the client that the timeline is insufficient for the quality they’re expecting. They tell the creative team that the client’s instinct about the concept, annoying as it is, has a valid business reason behind it. They absorb the discomfort of delivering bad news rather than distributing it to the parties least equipped to handle it.
These people are not universally beloved in the moment. Clients find them occasionally inconvenient. Agency management sometimes considers them “difficult.” But the work they produce — or rather, that gets produced under their watch — tends to be the work that people actually want to put in their portfolios. The work where something real happened because someone told the truth at the right moment.
The tragedy is systemic: the agencies that most need good account management are the ones least likely to reward it, because good account management looks like friction in the short term and only looks like value over a timeline that most agencies can’t afford to think about.
What Would Actually Fix It
A modest proposal, offered without expectation that it will be implemented: stop evaluating account managers on client happiness scores. Evaluate them on project outcome — did the work land? Did it ship on time and on brief? Did the creative team feel they had what they needed? Did the scope hold through the entire project?
This reorientation would immediately change the incentive structure. Account managers would start pushing back on unrealistic timelines because their evaluation depends on realistic ones. They would write better briefs because their success is tied to the success of work that emerges from those briefs. They would stop overpromising because every promise they make to a client is a commitment they have to honor — with work produced by people who weren’t in the room when the promise was made.
It would also, almost certainly, mean some clients leave. Clients who are used to being told yes to everything don’t love being told no. But those are also the clients for whom no work is ever good enough, because the real problem was never the work — it was the mismatch between what they said they wanted and what they actually needed. A mismatch that a good account manager’s job is to surface and resolve, not to paper over with enthusiasm and then blame on the creative team when it becomes visible six weeks later in a very tense Zoom call.
We have tools to measure everything now. We have dashboards for vanity and systems for tracking sentiment and retrospectives that nobody schedules. It would be genuinely interesting, for once, to measure the thing that actually breaks teams: the gap between what was promised and what was possible. The account manager who closes that gap is worth every euro of their retainer. The one who widens it is just expensive overhead in a good blazer.
If you’re in an agency and reading this, you already know which kind you have.
At NoBriefs, we believe the best protection against being thrown under the bus is being too honest to fit under it. If that resonates, the Fuck The Brief collection was made for people who say true things in client meetings. Find it at the shop — no account manager required to explain what it means.
by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
Act One: A marketing team produces a campaign concept that is genuinely surprising. It’s a little risky. It’s a little strange. It provokes the kind of internal reaction that, in a healthy company, would mean it’s probably the right call.
Act Two: The concept is presented to the Communications Committee.
Act Three: The concept is approved, subject to seventeen rounds of revisions that remove the surprise, the risk, the strangeness, and coincidentally also the entire point of the thing.
The communications committee. It’s not a villain. It’s a structural tragedy.
What Communications Committees Were Supposed to Do
In theory, the communications committee exists to provide governance over external messaging — to ensure that what goes out the door is accurate, legally defensible, strategically aligned, and not accidentally offensive in the Czech Republic. These are legitimate concerns.
Large organizations genuinely need some form of messaging oversight. A pharmaceutical company shouldn’t be running unreviewed clinical claims. A financial institution shouldn’t be making promises its products can’t keep. These are real problems that require real process.
The mechanism, however, has a design flaw so fundamental it might as well be a feature.
The Design Flaw
Communications committees bring together people whose professional incentives are structurally misaligned with creative risk. The legal representative’s incentive is to remove anything that could be challenged. The compliance officer’s incentive is to flag anything that deviates from approved language. The regional representative’s incentive is to add language that addresses their market’s specific concerns. The CEO’s chief of staff’s incentive is to ensure the CEO won’t be embarrassed.
Each individual in the room is doing their job correctly. Collectively, they are performing a function that systematically removes anything original from the output. This is not malice. It’s incentive design.
The result is corporate communication that is accurate, legally defensible, regionally sensitive, and completely indistinguishable from the communication of every other large organization in the sector. It says what it needs to say without ever saying anything. Fuck The Brief was designed for the moments when you’re sitting in one of these meetings and need somewhere safe to put your actual thoughts.
The Specific Failure Mode: Language Archaeology
The communications committee’s greatest contribution to human culture is the art of language archaeology: the careful excavation of any word or phrase that might be considered interesting and its replacement with something that has already been pre-approved elsewhere.
“Transformative” becomes “impactful.” “Bold” becomes “innovative.” “First” becomes “leading.” “Different” becomes “unique.” By the time the committee has finished, the press release reads like it was written by someone who has never met another human being but has read many press releases.
What Actually Works
Committees need decision-making frameworks, not approval cycles. The governance question isn’t “does everyone agree?” — it’s “does this pass the defined criteria?” Define the criteria once, up front. Give the final decision to one person with full accountability for the outcome. Review after the fact.
The alternative is what you’ve got: eighteen people slowly squeezing the life out of every interesting idea until what remains is a beige mist of approved terminology, distributed via a CMS platform, to an audience that will not read it.
The full toolkit at nobriefsclub.com/shop — for what you actually want to say.
There is a card for this
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by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
Somewhere in your company’s headquarters — probably in the corner with the best natural light, acquired before the design team could — there is a room with beanbag chairs, a ping pong table, and a whiteboard covered in post-its that have been there since 2019. This is the innovation lab. It has a mandate to “disrupt from within.” In three years of operation, it has produced one prototype that didn’t work, two reports that nobody implemented, and a TED Talk-style presentation shown at a conference in Amsterdam.
Why Every Company Has One Now
The innovation lab became mandatory around 2016, when every CEO who attended Davos came back convinced that if their company didn’t have a dedicated innovation function, it would be obsolete within five years. The innovation lab was the organizational response to this anxiety: it allowed companies to say “we’re innovating” while the core business continued doing exactly what it had always done, uninterrupted. The lab is a containment strategy for innovative thinking — keep it over there, in the beanbag room, where it can’t interfere with quarterly targets. This is not entirely cynical. Separating experimental work from operational work has genuine logic. The problem is that most innovation labs aren’t actually doing experimental work. They’re doing workshops about experimental work.
The Methodology Is the Output
Walk into any innovation lab and you’ll find an abundance of methodology and a scarcity of results. There are design thinking frameworks on the wall. There’s a “how might we” question that’s been there so long it’s become furniture. The team can explain each stage of the process with fluency. Ask them what they’ve actually built lately, and the conversation gets more interesting. The innovation lab has mistaken the process for the product. Running workshops about innovation, facilitating sprints about new products, producing reports about market opportunities — this is activity, not output. It generates slides. It generates a language of innovation that can be deployed in leadership presentations without requiring actual change. The KPI Shark sees through it. Those metrics on the wall don’t measure innovation; they measure workshop attendance and post-it density.
The Real Problem: Innovation Has Nowhere to Go
Assume the innovation lab actually produces something good — a genuinely novel product concept, a fundamentally different approach to an existing problem. What happens next? It needs budget, which means going through the annual planning process. It needs engineering resources, which are allocated to the roadmap. It needs commercial support, which is focused on existing revenue. The organizational immune system rejects it. Every company says it wants to innovate. What companies actually want is growth, predictability, and risk minimization — three things structurally incompatible with innovation. The lab exists in the gap between what companies say they want and what they’re organized to do. This is why the ping pong table gets more use than the prototyping equipment.
What an Innovation Function Actually Needs
A genuine innovation function needs three things most corporate labs don’t have: a direct line to decision-makers who can actually commit resources; permission to fail visibly without consequence; and timelines measured in years, not quarters. It also needs to stop calling itself an innovation lab. The name creates expectations about revolutionary breakthroughs that no team embedded inside a legacy organization can realistically meet. Call it what it is: an experimentation team. Run controlled experiments. Measure rigorously. Kill fast. Scale what works into the main business. No beanbag chairs required. But that would require admitting that “innovation” is mostly iterative work done carefully, not magic produced in a purpose-built room. And that’s a harder story to tell at the all-hands. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop for gear that disrupts nothing but looks great doing it.
by Ber | Apr 10, 2026 | Agency & Office Life
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
