The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 280 - Solo Off-Site

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Or should I say, welcome back?

Pete: Welcome back...what do you mean?

Jen: Well, Pete, what I mean is that I know last week, you embarked on what I think we're calling a "solo off-site", where you took yourself to an off-site, but just you. And I have not yet had a chance to hear about this solo off-site, and I want to ask you a lot of questions about how it went, what you did, and should we all copy you?

Pete: Alright, alright. Yeah, I haven't spoken about it yet, so let's talk about it. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Also, Pete, while you were off retreating to your solo off-site, I was getting a cold. (I'm sure you can hear that in my voice.) Okay, so what is a solo off-site? And why did you go to one?

Pete: You know, I have my amazing wife, Tracey, to thank for this. I have been threatening to...we've been laughing and discussing how Tracey in her work and a lot of senior leaders in their work have these strategic off-sites either yearly or quarterly or half yearly, where you take like a senior leadership team and they go to a venue that's not the office. And they usually intend to zoom out, talk about the vision of the company or the team and the organization, and where they're going, and what they've done well, and what they haven't done well, and basically have a conversation that's not day-to-day in the weeds, that's actually intended to set up the team or the organization for success over the next one, two, three, four years, whatever it is. And so Tracey in her work, she's a part of these all the time. And so I've been joking and threatening, like I mentioned, to like, "Oh, one day, I should do a Human Periscope off-site," as a bit of a joke, because Human Periscope is effectively just me, in terms of full-time. I do collaborate with people like you, obviously, and others, but the off-site would be just me. And so, we were joking, joking, joking. And then around Christmas time, Tracey's like, "I'm not going to leave the dinner table until you have booked this off-site. When are you doing it?" So I picked a date, which was last week, and spent two full days at an Airbnb about ninety minutes from home, with me, some colored textas, and a big A3 notepad, and I went to town for two days. So, that's the context.

Jen: That is so amazing. Did you go into this with an objective, like, "At the end of these two days, I will have accomplished or this will be a success if..."?

Pete: Yeah, a little bit. I would say...so, a couple things that worked really well. One is, the intention was do things that I don't do in the day-to-day, or think about things that I don't make time to think about when I'm just in the day-to-day. So like, yes, zooming out to, "What does the next three to five years look like, in a perfect world," or, "What does the next twelve months need to look like in order to get towards that vision?" I did have an idea of, "I want to zoom out. I want to think about things that I haven't thought about that much, in terms of like three to five years. And then, I want to get specific on, what do I need to be doing? What are the deliverables in the next twelve months to enable that to happen?" So that was like the rough idea. What went really well, which is like a learning for me, I think...I wonder if I could incorporate this in other parts of my work life...was, I had an agenda that was like hour by hour of, "The first ninety minutes, you're going to spend time reflecting on the last three years. The next ninety minutes, then you can get a coffee. Then the next ninety minutes...," and it was so specific. Because I guess the missing part of this, is, I run these for other leadership teams and organizations all the time. So like, I could facilitate these for others, and I've never facilitated one for myself. So I was like, "I know, just like I would if it was a client, I'm going to go, 'Bang, bang, bang, here's the agenda.'" And that worked really well. I'm a rule follower, and so I stuck to that agenda within a minute, Jen Waldman. Like, my breaks were when I said my breaks would be, my time finished when I said it was going to be, on time. So yes, that was the idea and the agenda.

Jen: That's so funny, because that was literally going to be my next question. Having been a participant in off-sites and also a designer of off-sites, it really is so important to have a structure.

Pete: Right.

Jen: I don't know if you felt this way, but when I've been a participant in off-sites, it's been good to know when we had to be done with a certain idea. Otherwise, we would just keep going and going and going.

Pete: Yes, you go...it's a loop, yeah. And that's where people often like having an external facilitator. Because you can see, as the external facilitator, when the topic is just going around in a circle, or you can see when everyone's getting pulled back into the weeds, that it's time to pull them out. So yes, that is why having a really structured agenda was important. And on top of that, we were just...I mean, Tracey and I, she helped me, like I said, design it. We were thinking about, "What are the things that happen at off-sites?" Firstly, there's a really great agenda. Secondly is, it's off-site. So, don't try and do this from your own office in the house. Go somewhere else. Thirdly, the other one that was funny I thought, was like, you usually go out for drinks and a dinner...

Jen: Right. Team building.

Pete: ...on the last night. So I took myself out for a nice dinner and had a beer, I was like, "This is fun."

Jen: Oh, that is so great.

Pete: I mean, it was a little lonely at times. But like, that's all part of it. It was fun. It was fun.

Jen: What I'm curious to hear is, how did you poke holes in your own theories? Or like, how did you push back or ask yourself questions about the ideas you were bringing to the table? Like, how did you play both sides of the conversation?

Pete: I guess my caveat on this is, maybe I didn't. But I think I tried to. I probably didn't do it as effectively as if there was someone else there, because that's the nature of having an external person to push back. But as part of the agenda, I'd come up with the kinds of questions I think would be worth exploring. So like, I've got the notepad in front of me, literally. I asked questions like, "What have I enjoyed the most over the last three years? What do I want to do less of? What do I want to do more of? What does big and audacious look like over the next three to five years? What's getting in the way of that?"

Jen: Mmm-hmm.

Pete: The like, "What do I want? And then, what's getting in the way," was me trying to sort of argue with myself about why that is either a good idea or not a good idea. "What are the benefits? What's in it for me? Who can help me?" And then I tried a bit of a Jen Waldman-ism, which was the (we talked about this in the STARlMAP episode) identity part of it, so, "I am the kind of person who ...". So I wrote, "At the end of 2026, I am ...". And then, "At the end of 2028, I am ...". And that was terrifying, but I attempted to write down some responses to those kinds of questions. So yeah, in short, I asked myself a heap of questions and forced myself to write responses. Maybe I, you know, didn't push back on some of them because it was just me. I don't know. But all I know is, I attempted to challenge myself through questions. And then the other thing that happened, there was two very memorable moments of feeling like a complete disaster, feeling stuck, feeling like a fraud, feeling like an absolute phony. There were two moments where I spiraled out of control. One of them you know about, because I messaged you. I messaged you and I messaged Tracey.

Jen: About your website?

Pete: Yes. And I messaged one other friend. And then in the other moment, I called my friend Josh. So I guess those external voices were actually me trying to help either challenge the mindset I was in or, to your point, like challenge my own thinking. So I did randomly call and message people when it felt appropriate, and that was actually really helpful.

Jen: Yes. So listeners, Pete sent an SOS that was like, "I think I might need to scrap my entire website and start from scratch. But it also might be absolutely fine as it is."

Pete: It was a spiral. That was a fun spiral. You know, like any off-site, there's parts that are energizing and there's parts that are draining and hard.

Jen: Yep, yep. Okay, so on a multi-day off-site, that sleeping time is so important between the two days.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Like really, by the end of day one, the brain is mush. You can't take in any more. It's like every idea muscle has been worked to the point of fatigue. And then you sleep, and you come back the next morning and there's like a freshness. At least, that's been my experience.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: When you're doing this on your own, was that your experience? Like, did the second day have a new sense of energy to it?

Pete: It did. And there was a couple of reasons I think that might have been the case. One is, I deliberately went to a place that's near the beach, because I knew if I swam in the morning in the ocean that would, regardless of how I felt, make me feel better. So, that definitely helped. The thing that perhaps I did because I was on my own, that I wouldn't have done if there were others maybe, is worked later than the agenda had suggested. As in after dinner, I was like, "I'll just tidy up. I've got a few more thoughts I want to get out prior to tomorrow." Which, when you're with other people or you were socializing and having a drink or whatever you were doing, I wouldn't have done that. So I probably pushed my sleep back more than I would, because I worked more. But I still woke up, yeah, I would say energized and refreshed. The other thing that I think...like, I don't know if I've ever been as productive as I was in this forty-eight hour period. And that was almost annoying, because of how productive I was. Like, why can't I be like this all the time? And I think part of it is since having family, the sacrifice of taking myself away. Not only am I away from my family, but I was actually feeling guilty that Tracey's, you know, at home on her own with Ollie. And so I was like, "I've got to make the most of this. This has got to be the best off-site that was ever created, the most productive, the most inspiring, the most, you know, groundbreaking." And it wasn't necessarily that groundbreaking, but it was like, I didn't give myself permission to not feel energized at the start of the day.

Jen: Okay, here is a beef that I sometimes have with off-sites...and I have many friends who have experienced this as well.

Pete: Hit me. Is it to do with sticky notes?

Jen: Well, no. And I just, I imagine that a solo off-site wouldn't suffer from this in quite the same way. So you get the team together, you generate all of these ideas, you have these big plans, you put a million sticky notes up on the wall, they get written down and collected, and then you go back to work on Monday and it's like, "What happened to all of the plans we wanted to implement," or like, "Who's actually leading the changes that we talked about? Like, who's going to own each piece of the things that we talked about?"

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: I imagine the benefit of the solo off-site is that the answer to every one of those questions is: you.

Pete: Totally, yeah.

Jen: You are accountable for all of it.

Pete: I am. And what I did, what I tried to do...maybe this is replicable to others, whether it's a solo off-site or a team off-site...is I had a page in my A3 notepad that was called Actions/GSD List, i.e. Get Shit Done List. And so I did all this thinking and whiteboarding, like you said, and then each night while I was having dinner, I looked at all the things I'd done that day and I wrote, "What are the actions that need to come from this?" And I wrote them as this blue list of actions/get shit done. And I've had that open on my desk since I got back, and I'm like methodically crossing each of those out so that they didn't just be this brainstorming exercise that didn't turn in to anything. One of them was, "Finish the website spiral," that I went through with you, and I'm like almost at the point where that's complete. So yes, I had a page that was like, "How do you turn this into action, essentially?" I think that's such an important question.

Jen: Yes. Because ideas that just stay ideas can start to become annoyances.

Pete: Yeah, yeah.

Jen: I've got to say, Pete, I don't want to put more work on your plate. But if you wanted to like create a little How To Run Your Solo Off-Site Guide PDF situation, I would buy that. I buy that from you.

Pete: Oh, that's interesting.

Jen: I would buy that download.

Pete: You would download that. And I mean, I think that two days feels a bit luxurious. I know some people, especially working in corporates, don't necessarily have the luxury, or people working for other people don't have the luxury. But I think the premise stands even if you did it as like three hours one morning on a Saturday morning, where you took yourself somewhere else and you intentionally tried to think about things or answer questions that you aren't answering in your day-to-day that propel you forward for the next year or two years. That part of how I frame this for myself is, "What can I do, like what can I achieve in these two days that makes the next four months easier?" Like, "Can you have already decided what your rules are with travel? Can you already write the agenda for the workshops that you need to run in February, March, April, so that when they roll around, you just need to run the workshops and you don't need to create an agenda from scratch?" Those kinds of things of like, "Can you set yourself up for success?" I think you can do that in a three hour morning, if you have three hours on a Saturday morning.

Jen: Do you think that the concentrated nature of it, that all these questions are being asked in a stack is part of what makes it successful? I'm legitimately asking this question. I don't have an opinion yet. And/or do you think it's possible, if you rolled out these questions over a longer period of time...like, let's say you had fourteen questions on that list. If you answered one a day, would you get the same kind of benefit that you do from stacking them?

Pete: Interesting question...I don't know the right answer. But immediately, I want to say no, you don't get the same benefit. You would get some benefit. I mean, any time you're posing and answering a question, I think you get some benefit. I think the beauty of them being stacked is, what doesn't come in between the stacking is the regular work, the work that you're doing in the day-to-day. So if you did a question in the morning and then went and did your regular day's work, and then did another question the next day, in my mind that would dilute the thinking or the type of thinking that you did that first day. So for me, answering the question first, and then immediately answering another question, and immediately answering another question didn't give me a hiding spot.

Jen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So, did you actually come out with the clarity that you were hoping to gain?

Pete: I did. And one of the things that was funny was I thought I would have a bow to tie around all of the things that I got done, all of where I got to. And what I actually found was, I was so energized by a couple of things in particular that I was working on them right up until I had to check out of my Airbnb. And actually, if I didn't have to check out, I probably would have kept going.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: So it wasn't like, "Oh, it's all packaged up. And I've reflected. And ah, deep breath. Now, I'm going back." I was actually like almost past that, in to the action list, and so energized by that. But I was like, "Oh my god, I could keep going. But I have to leave." So that, to me, is still a win, though. It wasn't unsuccessful because of that. It was actually probably even more successful, because it propelled me into action and energy.

Jen: Mmm. Love it.

Pete: So yeah, I would say it was a success.

Jen: Okay, so it sounds like the solo off-site is a success. What is your cadence going to be with this moving forward? Is this going to be an annual thing? Twice a year?

Pete: Yeah, I think annually or twice a year. I'm undecided yet. I think if you had the luxury, twice a year would be pretty awesome. And I recognize that, you know, we're all working within constraints, and sometimes that's really hard. Definitely annually, I think, is a cadence I would like to try and incorporate for sure.

Jen: I'm definitely stealing this from you, 100%.

Pete: I feel like you would build a continent, if you had a couple of days of like off-site.

Jen: Yeah, now I'm like, "My husband's on his way home. The second he walks in through the door, I'm going to be like, 'I'm leaving for two days.'"

Pete: "I'm out."

Jen: "See ya! Going to my Airbnb on the shore."

Pete: Well, I mean, I recommend it as a pattern interrupt. For me, it was really helpful. Like I said, I was annoyed at the productivity because I did things that I've been threatening in my brain to do for six-plus months that I just haven't got around to, because of all the excuses in the world that I'm good at coming up with. But the fact that I had the time, had the agenda, had a separate space kind of forced me to have no more excuses, to actually just get them done. And so for me, that is what makes it so important and so successful, because it's just so easy to get distracted in the day-to-day. And so, if anyone has the capability, I would highly encourage you to spend time investing in the business and investing in yourself by taking yourself somewhere else and doing some strategic off-site thinking.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.