I have attended a lot of strategy retreats. Great hotels, good dinners, engaged people. And results that gradually fade away within a few weeks of returning to the office.
Not because the strategy was bad. Because it was only talked about once.
The Problem Is Not the Content, It Is the Frequency
Strategy is not a document. It is not something you decide at a two-day seminar and then consider done. Strategy is something that must be lived, remembered and talked about repeatedly, in everyday work, by the same people who are supposed to execute it.
When you gather the leadership team at a conference hotel for two days, you create a moment of alignment. That is valuable. But a moment is not a culture.
Back at the office, the email backlog, the meeting rooms and the hundred daily decisions that never appeared on any PowerPoint slide are waiting. That is where the real strategy lives, or it does not.
Spend the Budget Differently
What if you used the conference budget on shared experiences that actually recharge people? A cultural event. A dinner with no agenda. A trip that gives the team real energy, mentally, professionally or socially.
And then did the strategy work in small, regular portions throughout the year. Like snacks on the table every day, not a large banquet once every six months that nobody quite remembers the taste of afterwards.
Shorter sessions, more often. Questions raised in every leadership meeting: Are we still on course? What is holding us back? What has changed since last time?
That requires discipline and a leader who genuinely owns the direction, not just presents it.
The Question Worth Asking
The next time someone suggests a strategy retreat at a hotel, there is one thing worth clarifying first: What happens to the strategy the day we are back at the office? That question is at the heart of the direction gap.
If the answer is unclear, the money is probably better spent elsewhere.
Arnstein Larsen
Arnstein Larsen is an advisor, board chair and interim executive specialising in strategy, leadership and organisational development. He helps organisations turn strategy into something people actually work by — not just something that lives in presentations. Arnstein serves as chairman of Primafon AS, board member of JSAN Consulting AS, and runs the advisory firm LAKI. He is the author of The Direction Gap, a practical guide for leaders who want to close the gap between strategy and everyday work.
