The invitation landed on December 12th, which is how you know it matters. Full day, hotel conference room in the Pearl, fruit plate at nine, butcher paper on three walls, phones in a basket by the door. Subject line: 2023 Brand Planning Offsite. Attached: a fifty one slide deck nobody would open beforehand and everybody would nod at during.
I have been to maybe thirty of these. Agency side, brand side, one memorably held in a converted barn with no heat.
Here is what I have never once seen happen at one. A strategy changed.
What happens instead is a leadership team walks in holding a decision made sometime in November, spends seven hours generating sticky notes around it, and walks out believing the room arrived there together. The stickies get photographed. The photograph goes into a follow up deck. The decision is now load bearing, and its origin has been quietly erased.
A planning offsite does not produce strategy, it launders a decision somebody already made into something the room believes it chose.
I want to be careful here, because that laundering is not worthless. Alignment is real. A team that believes it chose the plan will defend the plan in March when the plan is inconvenient. Confidence is a genuine operational asset and rituals are how humans manufacture it. Every culture that has ever run a harvest knew this.
The problem is when the ritual is the only thing in the room, and everyone pretends otherwise.
So three moves, if you have one of these on the calendar this month. One, bring the decision in already made and say so out loud. Not to be cynical, to free up the seven hours. Two, spend those hours on falsification instead of generation. Write down what would have to be true for this plan to work, then write down what you would see by June if it were not. Three, name what you are not doing. A plan with no sacrifice in it is a wish list with a budget stapled to the front.
The best offsite I ever attended did exactly this. The CMO opened by saying we are going premium, that part is settled, your job today is to find the three ways it kills us. By four o'clock we had found two. Both were real. One got fixed in Q2 because we saw it in January.
A plan with no sacrifice in it is a wish list with a budget stapled to the front.
She and I walked to Stumptown afterward in the rain, and she said the thing I still repeat to clients: the deck is not the deliverable, the argument is. Everything else is fruit plate.