Leaders wanting a banner quarter or year plan time away hoping their teams will come together, align on goals, build connection, and execute in stride.

One of the most common and pernicious mistakes leaders make is not thinking beyond the offsite itself. I call this the miraculous misconception.

It works like this:

“Let’s go away to a different set of conditions [ok so far], have a great experience [sounds fun], and then expect behavior and performance to be different when we return to exactly the same set of conditions we left [sounds fishy].”

The ropes courses and escape rooms and scavenger hunts won’t help any of this. It would take a miracle.

But real change doesn’t require miracles. It requires addressing root causes followed by ongoing iteration.

Offsites—intensive, immersive time away from routine work—can indeed be a catalyst for change. This starts with how we design and conceive of the journey that they are part of..


See the Executive Summary below.

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The world’s biggest offsite/retreat might be the World Economic Forum’s gathering in Davos. When WEF (the organization that plans it) launched a new arm in San Francisco in 2017, they hired us to design and facilitate a day-long retreat for their 40-person team. At the end of the day, the senior executive said, “I came in skeptical. But if two years from now we look back on our success, we’ll say it was because of the work we did today.” Another exec added, “This was one of the best offsites I’ve ever been a part of. And that’s saying something, because we do this for a living.”

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