Live snakes and wasted money: Why most company off-sites don’t work

I wish I could have the dollars back on almost all of the off-sites I held as a founder.

I probably spent over $1 million throughout the years in various companies flying people in from around the world (we were in four countries so that made off-sites particularly expensive). We would organise fun and sometimes quirky things to help build camaraderie and team cohesion. A particularly embarrassing example was organising live snakes to be snuck into the hotel for a “let’s face our fears” session. The hotel found out when one of the participants was bitten, and was then seen showing off their bite in the restaurant. They faced their fears whilst we faced eviction. Good times. 

But in reality, the majority of the money and time spent was a waste. After these off-sites little changed, and all the great things we agreed either never came to pass, or if they did, they were very late and over budget.

At the time I believed I was a particularly bad founder and CEO, but moving into consulting and then investing in founders, the patterns and issues of how dysfunctional off-sites generally are, became clearer. 

Off-sites: Right reason, wrong process

The impulse and intent are right. Founders and executives take their teams out of the day-to-day environment to work on culture, strategy, and team building. This is done when things feel a bit off the rails, or some companies proactively do it to a schedule. Plans are discussed with new strategies and visions for the future. A review of the past year perhaps, and all the things we have not yet done from the last off-site.

But the off-site environment is not the real world with all the real-time demands, conflicts, and managerial decision-making process problems.

After the off-site, participants go back to the office, and the existing world continues. The phone rings with a screw-up that needs to be dealt with immediately. Jim’s still arguing with Jane over some issues that are unresolved. Stacey and Ryan are still in conflict over x,y, and z. The founders are dealing with shareholders who are trying to pull them in different directions. 

The plans and new strategies discussed and agreed at the off-site concentrated on the long-term, but the issues the team gets sucked into are short-term. Short-term kills long-term. Day-to-day demands and conflicts consume all the energy and all the correct and well-meaning plans/strategies/visions/missions discussed and agreed on all take a back seat. 

What is missing is an integration of long-term and short-term problem-solving and change management. A process to identify and resolve all the short-term problems in parallel to implementing all the big long-term changes required to see new strategies come to life.

Some tips for successful off-sites

Tribe Global Ventures tries to facilitate the off-sites of our portfolio companies and use tools and techniques I learnt whilst with the Adizes Institute. By facilitating, it allows the founders and executives to participate fully and equally.

Here are some high-level tips.

As a team, accumulate all the issues in the company — big or small

We use the Adizes “PIP” process to do this. “PIPs” or Potential Improvement Points for the company are collected one at a time from each participant. Everyone gets their say, although there is no guarantee they will get their way.

Create a big list. Some of these items will be small, some will be big, but what you are trying to do is create a stock take of everything, not just look at the big, exciting things while ignoring the little annoying things. It’s the little annoying things that stop big exciting things from being executed.  

Do all the exciting vision and goal-planning stuff first

And then ask, “okay, in order to achieve these exciting new goals/strategies/visions, what PIPs must we resolve in order to achieve said goals/strategies?”. This is where you will get all the issues that are going to conspire against these goals, strategies and grand visions. 

Understand that the biggest “PIP” is never captured

In reality, the biggest PIP is: “we have an inefficiency proactively identifying and solving PIPs as a team in the face of day-to-day demands”. Every word of that sentence is important. If you can change this to be your biggest asset — “our biggest asset is the ability to identify and solve PIPs as a team in the face of day-to-day demands” — you’ll have a much healthier and higher-performing company. 

Almost none of the PIPs can be solved by one person alone

People are not lazy. If they have the authority and power to go and solve something, they tend to just solve it. What gets left behind, however, are things where several people are required to solve it. People are busy working on their own issues, and just don’t get time to come together and agree to work on things that require multiple people. And then different people have different incentives, different views on what’s a problem and what’s not, and different roles. It can get messy. 

Create a monthly session where all you do is come back to the PIPs

What have we solved? Cross them off the list. What should we work on next? Prioritise and launch areas of priority. Do we have any new PIPs? Add them to the list. Create a rhythm of constant identification, prioritisation and resolution. 

Off-sites are the first step

It is the last two points where the rubber needs to hit the road. For the off-site to be successful, it really needs to be seen as a first step in a larger process. It is the first step to being great at creating teams that can transcend inevitable conflicts and proactively identify and solve PIPs in the face of day-to-day demands. This must be a foundational asset of the company. 

When I worked with Hungry Jacks and Domino’s, facilitating their off-site and implementing the process, Jack Cowin described it as the “rails for the company to run on” and I like this analogy. Instead of the off-site being a one-off thing we do once or twice a year, which becomes an inevitable talk fest, it becomes the thing we do to lay down, and then strengthen, the rails to run on. 

Successful companies do two things. First, they identify problems really quickly and solve them. And secondly, they capitalise on opportunities faster than their competitors. Find me a successful company that is killing it — it is doing those two things. Find a company in trouble or that has disappeared — its internal managerial processes could not do those two things effectively. So it is not just solving the issues, it is creating the process where the issues will inevitably get solved. 

So, hosting off-sites isn’t the issue. They are required and can be a lot of fun (try not to get bitten by a snake). Rather, it is the process that occurs within the off-site, and how that process continues after the off-site that creates the problem. 

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