Positioning is not a workshop output

An outside consultant’s case against the two-day offsite, and what she runs instead.

I have run the two-day offsite perhaps forty times. It produces energy, alignment, a set of photographs and a document that is dead within a quarter.

The problem is structural. Positioning is a claim about how a market will behave, and a room full of your own colleagues has no information about how the market will behave. You are running a well-catered opinion poll.

What I run instead takes six weeks and is much less fun. Twelve buyer conversations, three lost-deal debriefs, a competitor language audit, and only then a half-day session — whose job is to choose between options that already have evidence attached, not to generate them.

The energy is lower. The survival rate is much higher.