Big strategy offsites with leadership teams are often used to develop big important strategies for companies.

This is typically a flawed approach.

These offsites often produce long laundry lists of items that everyone believes need to be addressed. The inevitable outcome is that someone organizes the chaos into categories and calls it a “strategy.”

Strategy is as much about what you won’t do as what you will do.

In my experience, big strategy offsites are useful for two distinct purposes (these should not be combined in the same offsite):

1. A leader can gather a wide range of raw ideas, which should undergo extensive consideration and pruning (separate from the offsite) before being formed into any kind of strategy.

2. A leader can socialize a roughly pre-defined strategy with their team for debate, final refinement, and buy-in. The intention is for the strategy to be operationalized immediately after the offsite.

In both cases, however, there is so much that can go wrong.

Here are a couple of tips to minimize bad outcomes:

1. Ensure there are one or two people with clear discipline, taste, judgment, and knowledge of modern comparables from successful companies. This can be the difference between a successful offsite and a giant talk fest.

2. Be cautious about piecing together ideas and insights from "comparable" companies. Often, a) the companies are not truly comparable, b) piecing together different strategies from different companies with very different strategies can result in a confused outcome for your company, and/or c) you can learn the wrong lessons from those companies. Any combination of these things can be disastrous.

You must be consistent across your strategy and reason from first principles.