Secrets of a great off-site retreat

It’s not every day that you find yourself in a hastily assembled platoon of your IT colleagues, crouched behind a barrel with your finger resting nervously on the trigger of your gun, hoping the enemy doesn’t shoot you from behind while you’re providing cover fire for your director of engineering as he valiantly initiates a full frontal assault on the enemy compound.

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That’s exactly where I found myself recently, but the stakes of our battle could not have been lower. My colleagues and I were toting harmless laser-tag guns and the wily enemy was really just a highly disorganized band of 9-year-olds burning off the sugar rush of a birthday party. After sustaining heavy casualties in our first round of laser tag that day, we came back for our second game with a plan. Those 9-year-olds didn’t stand a chance against my group of battle-hardened IT commandos.

Thus concluded the second day of our two-day, off-site retreat — a semi-annual tradition of the InfoWorld IT department. Our retreats work like this: We block off two days, one day for a focused strategy session and the second day for a fun activity — in this case, laser tag. While the format of our retreats is fairly loose, we do have a few guiding principles.

First, it really has to be off-site. To me, holding an off-site in the same old company conference room where you normally have meetings detracts from the focus required to really step out of the day-to-day and get larger things done, which is the whole point. Fortunately, the small size of my group means we can meet at a team member’s house. Though our meetings are outside the office, we’re frugal. We order pizza for lunch and I buy sodas and coffee at the grocery store the night before. When we had our last meeting at my house, I grabbed a whiteboard and some markers when I left the office the day before and set those up in my living room for the meeting.

The structure of the first day is simple. We start with a list of key topics we want to explore completely and commit to emerging from the meeting with a documented action plan for each of them. At our most recent retreat, for example, we discussed performance tuning, systems monitoring, backups, fault tolerance, content management, and documentation.

The meeting is strategic, but we don’t shy away from getting down to tactical detail if necessary. The action plan that emerges becomes our road map for the next six months, and we refer back to it at our next retreat to see how we did. When we’re done with the list, the meeting adjourns. I don’t insist on keeping the team longer if we finish early.

Now for the important stuff: How do we choose the fun activity? Simple: I ask the group for suggestions, and we make a short list of reasonably priced options. Usually, a consensus quickly forms, but when that doesn’t happen, we vote. This time it was laser tag, and at $15 per person for two 30-minute games and 12 tokens for the adjoining arcade, the price was right.

Having the group pick the activity eliminates the dreadful sense of forced “fun” that permeates so many corporate-sponsored team-building activities. Maybe some teams actually enjoy ropes courses or the platitudes of motivational speakers, but I think there’s something to be said for taking out a 9-year-old who’s aiming at your best engineer.