Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Strategic Offsite

On Monday, Rachel and I started what is sure to be an ongoing event: a strategic offsite. For those not in the business world, this is simply a buzzword that refers to a period of time during business hours that is half-related to business matters, and half-related to gloriously wasting time.

A typical strategic offsite will look something like this:
30 minutes: Icebreaker activity
30 minutes: Introduction to the day
1.5 hours: Strategic visioning
1 solid hour: Lunch
1 hour: More strategic visioning
30 minutes: Wrap-up
2 hours: Fun team-building activity such as golf, scavenger hunt, or bowling
1+ hours: Happy Hour. Call your spouse to tell them you'll be home late

For Rachel and me, we started our day at the fabulous new "Art House Cafe" in Tacoma's Stadium District. Great new place, it reminds me of the clean, crisp, hipster cafes you typically find in more international cities. The staff graciously didn't mind at our open laptops where we studiously identified the balances of our various investment and debts, and created paths towards paying down frustrating student loans. We took our strategic visioning to "7 Seas Brewery" in Gig Harbor, where sat in the corner of the beer garden - ale in one hand, keyboard in the other - creating and manipulating spreadsheets to help us meet our financial and family goals. Vacations were planned, summer camps were reserved. It was productive indeed!

And our fun team-building time waster? Iron Man 3. Which was, in retrospect, ironically the least fun part of the day. I think if I had it to do over again I would have gone to the park and played frisbee with Rachel. I tend to have more fun talking with Rachel than sitting side by side watching a brain-numbing action romp.

We're looking forward to another Strategic Offsite. Maybe we'll make these quarterly. Sometime in August I will hopefully post again on this subject.