I recently returned from a corporate retreat to kick off the 2026 business year. If you haven’t spent forty-eight hours in a windowless ballroom named “The Regency C,” surviving solely on lukewarm coffee and those tiny individual packets of pretzels that contain more air than salt, I truly envy you.
As I sat there watching a facilitator draw a “Growth Mindset Tree” on a flipchart with a squeaky marker, I realized that humor was my only reliable oxygen source. There is something inherently surreal about a room full of grown adults, many with advanced degrees and decades of experience, nodding in unison at a PowerPoint slide about “leveraging our core competencies” while secretly wondering if they fed their pets.
By hour six, we had entered the “Visioning Phase.” We were encouraged to “blue-sky” our “omnichannel pivot” and “socialize” our “synergistic roadmaps.” I spent 45 minutes wondering if I needed to take the PowerPoint out for drinks or if I was being recruited into a very well-dressed cult.
But beneath the satire of the trust-falls and the neon-colored sticky notes, a sobering realization set in. We weren’t just there to burn a hole in the Q1 budget. We were there because we actually care about the direction of the ship. We just have a very funny way of showing it.
The Rise of “Shelfware” and the Lord of the Rings Syndrome
The “Strategic Plan” is a sacred ritual in the local business community. It usually involves a mountain of Post-it notes and enough visionary energy to power a small city. By the end of the retreat, you’ve birthed a 60-page PDF bound in professional-grade cardstock. It’s beautiful. It’s bold. And, statistically speaking, it is currently being used as a very expensive coaster for someone’s morning latte.
In the industry, we call this “Shelfware.” The shelf life of a strategic plan is usually roughly the time it takes for the team to walk from the hotel parking lot back to their desks and see 400 unread emails. This is what I call the “Lord of the Rings” syndrome: we write a plan so long and complex it requires an appendix and a map of Middle Earth to navigate.
We suffer from “Vague-itis.” Goals like “Maximize stakeholder connectivity” are popular because they are impossible to fail — mostly because nobody knows what they actually mean. If your strategy contains the words world-class, bespoke, or holistic, you aren’t planning; you’re playing Buzzword Bingo.
The “Post-Retreat Hangover”
The true test of a strategic plan doesn’t happen in the ballroom; it happens in the first 72 hours back at the office. This is the “Post-Retreat Hangover.” You walk into the building feeling like a visionary, ready to “disrupt the market,” only to be immediately confronted by a broken copier, a disgruntled client, and a stack of overdue invoices.
Most strategies die here because we fail to build a “buffer.” We expect teams to execute a brand-new, complex strategy while still carrying 100% of their previous workload. To fix this, leadership must provide Resource Alignment. If you add a new strategic goal, you must ask: “What are we stopping so we have the capacity for this?” True support isn’t just a pat on the back; it’s the permission to let go of low-value tasks to make room for the new vision.
From “The Plan” to “Our Plan:” The Translation Layer
Ownership is the “secret sauce” that was missing from the Regency C ballroom. Without ownership, a strategic plan is just a list of chores handed down by a distant parent. When a team actually owns the strategy, the dynamic shifts from “compliance” to “commitment.”
However, ownership often gets lost in the “Translation Layer.” This is where a CEO’s high-level vision (“We will dominate the regional sector”) meets the middle manager who has to tell their team what to do on Tuesday. If that manager can’t translate “sector dominance” into “answering the phones within three rings,” the strategy remains a ghost.
When ownership is present, Shared Accountability becomes the default. It’s no longer a manager asking, “Did Chuck do his part?” Instead, it’s the team asking, “How are we doing on our goal?” This shifts the burden of leadership from a single person’s shoulders to the collective strength of the group.
The “Pre-Mortem:” Using Humor to Find the Truth
One way to ensure ownership is to invite the “Elephant in the Room” to the table. During my retreat, I noticed a lot of polite nodding. Polite nodding is the silent killer of business. If your team is too afraid to laugh at a bad idea or point out a glaring flaw during the planning stage, they will never take ownership of the execution.
I suggest every business conduct a “Pre-Mortem.” Ask your team: “Imagine it is December 31, 2026, and this plan has failed spectacularly. Why did it happen?” When you give people permission to be “negative” in a safe environment, you find the real obstacles. You move from a culture of “polite nodding” to a culture of “radical candor.”
To my fellow local business leaders: let’s stop “boiling the ocean” and start talking to our people like human beings. Kill the adjectives, embrace the verbs, and remember that the best strategic plan isn’t the one that stays open in a browser tab for six months. It’s the one that gets messy, gets edited, and actually smells like the sweat of execution.
