Three weeks is the duration of the Pacific crossing from the Galapagos to the Marquesas. It is also, for a leadership team that has been working together for years and that has developed the communication patterns and the social dynamics and the unexamined assumptions that every team develops across years of working together, the minimum duration for something genuinely different to happen.
Not the two-day offsite that reinforces the existing dynamic in a different setting. Three weeks of the conditions that the offshore passage creates, in a space that has no exit and no agenda and no professional context that requires the performed version of anyone.
What happens is specific and it has been observed by everyone who has taken a leadership group through a long offshore passage. Not all of it is comfortable. Some of it is the most useful thing that team has experienced in their time working together.
Week One: The Shedding
The first week is the week of the shedding: the gradual removal of the professional layer that each person arrived with. The inbox stops being the primary morning concern by day three. The social performance of professional identity, the specific way each person presents themselves in the role they occupy, begins to thin because the role is not available to perform in the offshore context.
Nobody is the CFO on the passage. They are the person who is managing the seasickness on day two or reading the weather on day four or making the coffee for the night watch on day six. The role titles become irrelevant in the specific way that the offshore environment makes all social constructions irrelevant: the sea does not know who anyone is and does not adjust its behaviour for the seniority of the people experiencing it.
Week Two: The Visibility
By the second week the actual people are visible. Not the roles, not the performed identities, not the specific version of each person that the professional context produces and that the professional context requires. The actual people: how they manage difficulty, how they behave when they are tired or uncomfortable or in a situation that is genuinely outside their expertise, how they treat people who are below them in the hierarchy when the hierarchy is not visible to enforce, what they find funny, what they find moving, what they care about when there is nothing else to manage.
This visibility is bilateral. The leader who thought they knew their team members sees things in the second week that three years of quarterly meetings never revealed. The team members see things about each other and about their leader that the office context systematically prevented. The specific honesty that the second week of an offshore passage produces is not the honesty of a designed exercise or a facilitated conversation. It is the honesty of people who have been in the same small world for long enough that the social infrastructure that makes dishonesty comfortable and convenient has been removed by the environment rather than by the agenda.
Week Three: The Decisions
The decisions that get made in week three of a long passage between people who have spent two weeks becoming visible to each other are different in quality from the decisions that get made in the boardroom between people who are performing their professional identity. Not different in content necessarily, though sometimes that too. Different in the quality of the reasoning that produces them and the quality of the commitment that follows them.
The specific thing that the offshore passage does to a decision is that it removes the performance incentive from the discussion that precedes it. In the boardroom, every contribution to a strategic discussion carries a social cost and a social benefit: the person who says something that turns out to be wrong loses status, the person who says something that turns out to be right gains it, and the calculation of these social costs and benefits influences what people say as much as what they actually think.
On a boat in week three, when the social layer hs been shed and the actual people are visible and the professional context that enforces the performance incentive is five thousand miles away, people say what they actually think. The decision that emerges from that conversation is the most honest version of what the team actually believes, rather than the most political version of what the team can agree to say in the presence of each other’s professional identities.
