The marker squeaks. It’s a high-pitched, piercing sound that cuts through the artificial chill of the ‘Grand Ballroom C.’ 43 people, all earning six figures, are watching a facilitator named Brent draw a circle around the word ‘synergy’ for the 13th time since breakfast. I am sitting in the back, nursing a lukewarm espresso that cost the company $13, and I can’t stop thinking about the fitted sheet I tried to fold this morning. It’s currently a tangled, irreducible lump of cotton on my bed, a mocking testament to my inability to find the corners. Strategy offsites are the fitted sheets of the corporate world. You try to find the edges, you try to tuck the logic into a neat rectangle, but you end up with a ball of frustration that you just shove into a closet and hope no one notices until the next guest arrives.

Felix K. sits next to me. Felix is an insurance fraud investigator by trade, a man who spends his days looking for the microscopic tears in a story where a ‘stolen’ car actually ended up at the bottom of a lake for the insurance payout. He’s here because the CEO is paranoid about ‘internal leakage,’ but Felix isn’t looking at the balance sheets today. He’s looking at the whiteboard. ‘This,’ Felix whispers, gesturing to the $53,003 worth of catered salmon, premium golf rentals, and neon-colored Post-it notes, ‘is the most elaborate victimless crime I’ve ever seen. They aren’t stealing money, technically. They’re stealing the illusion of purpose to justify their own existence to the board. It’s a classic arson-for-profit scheme, but instead of a warehouse, they’re burning time.’

The Ritual of Meaningless Words

We are currently in the ‘Visioning’ phase. This is where we take words that used to have meaning-words like ‘growth,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘customer-centric’-and beat them into a pulp until they resemble a grey, flavorless paste. The goal is to create a mission statement that is so broad it can never be proven wrong, yet so specific it sounds like it was written by an AI having a mid-life crisis. Last year, the mission statement was ‘To Empower the Future.’ This year, after 23 hours of debate, we are pivoting to ‘To Architect the Future Through Empowerment.’ The board will see the change, nod sagely at the 73-slide deck, and approve the next round of funding. It is a ritual. It is a dance. It is a $373-per-night resort stay where we pretend that the primary obstacle to our success is a lack of vocabulary rather than a lack of courage.

I remember one offsite three years ago where we spent 403 minutes discussing whether ‘global’ or ‘international’ was the more inclusive term for our shipping department. We had 13 people in the room, and the combined hourly rate of that conversation could have bought a small fleet of delivery vans. We chose ‘global.’ By the time we got back to the office on Tuesday, 7 of those people had forgotten the decision, and 3 others were actively using the word ‘transnational’ just to be difficult. This is the secret that Felix K. understands better than anyone: the fraud isn’t in the lie itself; it’s in the effort required to maintain the lie.

The Definition of Strategy: Saying ‘No’

Strategy, in its truest form, is the act of saying ‘no’ to things. It is the brutal, often painful process of deciding what you will not do. It is the trade-off. But offsites are designed to avoid pain. They are designed to make everyone feel like they are winning. We sit on beanbags and do trust-falls-which, by the way, I once saw go horribly wrong when a VP named Greg decided to ‘test’ the physics of it and ended up with a $2,333 chiropractor bill-and we promise each other that we can have it all. We can have low costs and high quality. We can have rapid innovation and total stability. We can have a fitted sheet that folds itself.

But the reality is that the sheet remains a mess. I find myself digressing into the physics of linens because it’s a more honest problem than ‘strategic alignment.’ When you fold a sheet, you are dealing with physical constraints. When you are at a retreat, you are dealing with egos. There’s a specific kind of ego that thrives in these environments, the one that believes a 3-day excursion can solve 363 days of operational dysfunction. These leaders aren’t looking for a map; they’re looking for a photo-op with a map so they can tell the shareholders they know where they’re going.

Agility vs. Pre-Planned Exit Strategy

Felix K. leans in again. ‘See that guy?’ he asks, pointing to the Chief Operating Officer who is currently building a tower out of LEGO bricks to represent ‘cross-functional synergy.’ ‘He knows the tower is going to fall. He’s already planning the speech about why the fall was actually a strategic pivot into a horizontal architecture. In my line of work, we call that a pre-planned exit strategy. In this room, they call it agility.’

I’ve spent the last 123 minutes watching a fly buzz against the window of the ballroom. It wants to get to the golf course, unaware that the glass is an invisible barrier. We are the same. We see the ‘strategy’ on the other side of the glass, a clear path to success, but we keep banging our heads against the same buzzwords, wondering why we aren’t moving forward. The fly doesn’t need a visioning session. It needs to find the one window that is actually open.

The Real Work: Decisions, Not Retreats

Strategy isn’t a retreat. It’s the 43 small decisions you make every day when no one is watching. It’s the uncomfortable conversation you have with a vendor on a Tuesday morning. It’s the decision to stop doing a project that isn’t working, even if it means admitting you were wrong. You don’t need a $53,003 budget to do that. You just need to stop pretending that the whiteboard has the answers. The answers are in the work, in the messy, un-foldable reality of the daily grind.

As the sun sets over the resort, casting long shadows across the $73-per-person appetizer spread, Brent the facilitator asks us to give ourselves a round of applause. We clap. It’s a hollow, dry sound. We’ve ‘agreed’ on everything, which means we’ve committed to nothing. We’ll go back to the office, the Post-it notes will be transcribed into a PDF that no one will ever open, and the cycle will begin again in 363 days.