How strategy feels very different depending upon where you sit in the organization.
A peculiar pattern repeated itself every year in the India office of a global technology organization.
Come September, projects slowed.
People grew restless.
Congregations at the tea stall outside the office swelled.
The cause lay thousands of miles away.
It was the annual executive offsite in October.
The offsite had earned a reputation for radical decisions and abrupt reversals. Employees held their breath, bracing for impact.
There was little point perfecting the present.
Why optimize for a system whose rules might soon change?
Better to wait.
See how the dice rolled.
The “backflip” decisions were the most telling.
Two offsites ago, the product function was decentralized from global HQ, giving each country its own product team—closer to local markets, faster to respond, sharper against competition.
Last offsite, the call was reversed.
The new thesis: 80% of requirements were universal. Like Uber or Meta, scale demanded centralization—one product team, one roadmap, one roof.
The Strategy Room
The offsite was its own Davos.
Snow-dusted landscapes.
Pre-reads thick with data.
Benchmarks.
Scenario models.
External facilitators probing assumptions.
The room was not careless. It was rigorous.
Market trajectories were dissected.
Cost structures challenged.
Capital reallocated.
Portfolio choices were made deliberately—guided by principles such as cutting losses and ignoring sunk costs.
In that room, the logic held.
Only, logic travels poorly.
Strategic Whiplash
By the time the decisions reached the countries—compressed into townhalls and hurried communication “cascades”—they felt abrupt. Detached. Arbitrary.
At HQ, a careful game of chess was underway.
On the ground, it felt like snakes and ladders.
Employees did not ask, “What changed?”
They asked, “Will I land on the right square this time?”
Strategic whiplash is not rare.
Because we underestimate a critical layer in execution:
the human translation layer.
We treat pivots like software updates.
Push the code.
Assume the system will comply.
But organizations are not machines.
They are collections of people—each carrying context, identity, ambition, and risk.
Over time, the pattern became visible.
Project launches dropped 60% in Q3 compared to Q1-Q2. Budget utilization fell from 90% to 60%. Internal transfer requests tripled in November.
This wasn’t resistance. It was rational adaptation.
Why start a project in September that might get killed in October? Why spend budget on a priority that might change? Why hire for a team that might get reorganized?
What’s In It For Me?
A deliberate change plan doesn’t just announce a decision.
It answers five questions for every person asked to live with it:
Strategic — Why this shift, and why now?
Personal — What does this mean for me?
Legacy — What becomes of the work I just finished?
Agency — How can I shape what comes next?
Enablement — What will I be given to succeed?
These aren’t nice-to-haves.
They’re the difference between change that sticks and change that gets sabotaged.
The goal of leadership isn’t merely to be right in October.
It is to be trusted in September.
Because the real measure of a global offsite is not the brilliance of the slides in the mountains.
It is the conversations at the tea stall in November.
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