The Post-it note feels warm and slightly tacky under your thumb. The marker’s fumes, a sharp chemical tang of artificial grape, are already starting to give you a headache. You’re standing in front of a whiteboard under a heading, ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goals,’ written in a facilitator’s impossibly neat handwriting. You place your note-‘Hyper-personalized Customer Journeys’-next to someone else’s ‘Blockchain-enabled Supply Chain.’ It’s the ninth one you’ve added. You feel a jolt, not of inspiration, but of profound déjà vu. This is the room from last year. And the year before. The same beige walls, the same urn of lukewarm coffee, the same sense of urgent inertia.

Jargon as Costumes

I used to hate corporate jargon. I’d argue that words like ‘synergize’ and ‘leverage’ were just lazy ways to sound important. I still think that’s mostly true, but I’ve softened. I now see them as costumes. Saying “We need to ideate on a new paradigm for customer engagement” is the linguistic equivalent of a wizard putting on their robe and pointy hat. It signals to the other players that you are in-character and ready to begin the game. The words don’t need to mean anything concrete. Their purpose is liturgical. They are chants for the church of managerial capitalism.

And this church is expensive. The invoice for the resort will be $49,999. The facilitator, a man named Ken who has never worked a day in your industry, costs another $9,999. There are 29 executives in this room. Let’s be conservative and peg the average fully-loaded cost to the company for each of you at $199 per hour. For two full eight-hour days, that’s over $92,000 in salaries. We’re deep into six figures for a group therapy session where the primary output is a deck of 49 PowerPoint slides that will be emailed out, filed, and never opened again. A staggering 99.9% of the ‘actionable insights’ generated here will dissolve into the ether before the next quarterly earnings call.

Forgetting is the point. The act of collectively wiping the slate clean of these grand plans two weeks later is the final, crucial step of the ritual. It allows the organization to return to its comfortable equilibrium without the burden of actually having to change. If the plans were implemented, it would disrupt power structures, create real work, and introduce risk. The performance provides the feeling of progress without the messy reality of it. The shared secret of its irrelevance is what bonds the leadership team together. “Remember that crazy idea about drone delivery we had at the offsite?” they’ll laugh months later. “Good thing we never did that.”

It’s a profound disconnect between the grand, abstract gesture and the small, tangible reality. For a long time, I was part of the problem. I’ll admit it: I used to be the facilitator. I was Ken. I believed in the markers and the frameworks. I genuinely thought that getting smart people in a room and asking them to ‘think outside the box’ was the highest form of value creation. My moment of clarity came during a session with a shipping company. After two days of generating 199 sticky notes about AI-driven logistics and automated fleets, the most senior executive in the room took me aside. He said, “This was great. But the real problem is that our drivers can’t find a decent place to park or a clean bathroom on 79% of their routes.”

All our blue-sky thinking, all our strategic pillars, they meant nothing compared to the concrete, daily, undignified reality of a truck driver’s life. We were building a cathedral in the clouds while the foundation was rotting. The executives didn’t talk about it because it wasn’t strategic, it wasn’t ‘big picture.’ It was just a problem. A real one.

The Chasm: Abstract vs. Tangible Value

This is the chasm where most corporate endeavors fail. They trade tangible, immediate value for abstract, future-tense promises. When everyone gets home from the expensive role-playing game, what do they actually do? They don’t pull out the strategic plan for a little light reading. They collapse on the couch. They want to decompress. They want something that simply works, that delivers what it promises without a facilitator or a three-day workshop. They want to watch the game they missed or a movie they’ve been meaning to see. They seek out the opposite of the offsite: a simple, direct transaction of value, like firing up an Abonnement IPTV service. There are no frameworks, no trust falls. You press a button, and the thing you want appears. Its value is self-evident. It solves a real, human need for entertainment and escape, not an imagined corporate need for a new mission statement.

We love the drama of strategy because it feels important. It’s easier than fixing the bathrooms. It’s more glamorous than checking the elevator cables. The perfect parallel park I managed this morning, sliding a two-ton machine into a space with just inches to spare, gave me a more lasting sense of accomplishment than any strategic offsite I’ve ever attended. One was a real interaction with physics and reality; the other was a pantomime.

So we keep having the meetings. We keep writing on the whiteboards. We keep performing the ritual. We produce these elaborate, expensive artifacts of intention-the slide decks, the strategic plans, the laminated vision cards-and then we leave them behind. We do this because the real goal is not to change the organization. The goal is to reaffirm our own positions within it. The strategy is the sacrificial offering, burned on an altar of consensus to appease the gods of the quarterly report. It’s forgotten because its purpose was fulfilled the moment the meeting ended.