The Annual Offsite

Attended an agency's annual strategy offsite once. Two days in a country house hotel. The whole leadership team. Professional facilitation. Very good biscuits.

At the end of day two they had a fifty-six-page strategy document covering every part of the business. The CEO was pleased. Everyone signed off on everything. They went home.

I called him three months later to check in. He said things were busy. I asked about three specific items from the document. He had to look it up.

The problem with that kind of planning is that it produces decisions rather than actions. A fifty-six-page document is not a plan. It's a record of what everyone agreed to consider important during two days in a country house in October. By January the business has moved on and nobody knows which bits still apply.

Agencies that actually execute tend to have fewer commitments rather than better-organised ones. Twenty tasks a year. Five per quarter. One per person. Each one researched, tested on a small scale, then rolled out. No task starts until the previous one is done.

It produces a shorter document. But it gets executed.

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