Eight or nine months ago you ran an offsite. A good one – externally facilitated, everyone engaged, a plan you believed in. You left energised.
Then you came back to the firm, and the plan quietly stopped moving. Not all at once – just a little less each week, until you looked up most of a year later and almost nothing had been done. The frustration is rising, the tension between partners with it, and you’re starting to look across the table at each other wondering who’s to blame. Was it us? Our discipline? Was the plan wrong? Was the whole planning process a waste of time?
None of those, most likely — and I’d start by taking three of them off the table.
When a firm brings me in on this, they almost always describe it as an accountability and discipline problem. The first thing I usually tell them is that it isn’t. In the cases I’ve seen, the planning was sound and the plan was good – and the partners are among the most disciplined people in the building. Discipline isn’t what’s missing. If you conclude it is, you’ll go looking for another offsite, or a new plan, or a way to hold each other’s feet to the fire – and none of that touches what’s actually stopping you.
Two things usually are.
The first is that the projects coming out of an offsite are big – ambitious, important, and shapeless. No one is quite sure how to start, and a large, vague project is quietly stressful to look at. So, people do the natural thing: they turn to the work they know. Client work is certain, familiar, and finish-able – it’s a relief from the ambiguity of the strategic project sitting untouched in the corner. Nobody decides to abandon the plan. They just keep choosing the thing that isn’t frightening, and the plan loses momentum one comfortable choice at a time.
The second is that your firm – like almost every firm – is built around the urgent. Deadlines, compliance, the client on the phone: the entire operating rhythm is tuned to what’s pressing. Strategic projects are important but not urgent, so every single day they lose to the things that are. It isn’t a failure of will. It’s a plan swimming against the tide of how the firm actually runs, and the tide wins by default.
So, the fix isn’t more discipline. It’s changing the two things that are actually in the way.
We break the big projects into 90-day pieces – small enough that people know how to start, concrete enough to finish, with a defined deliverable reported at the end of each cycle. There’s a reason for working this way rather than trying to map the whole thing out in advance: you can’t plan your way through uncertainty. You take a considered action, see what the feedback tells you, then adjust and take the next one. Perfect plans don’t survive contact with a changing market; steady, correcting progress does. So, the 90-day rhythm solves both problems at once – there’s nothing shapeless left to avoid, and the important work finally has a cadence the urgent can’t crowd out. The goal stops being “get it all done fast” and becomes real, visible progress every quarter. Consistency beats speed.
The most telling change is in the question people ask. It stops being how quickly can we get this done? – which the urgent always answers with “not this week” – and becomes what’s the latest acceptable date this has to be finished by, and what support do we need to make sure we hit it? That single shift is the important asserting itself over the urgent.
Then we push the work off the partners’ desks and into the team. That does three things at once: it takes the load off the partners, it engages the whole firm in a plan that used to live only at partner level, and it quietly trains your people in project management, problem-solving and working across the firm – lifting their heads beyond their own patch to see how their work serves the whole.
You’ve got a plan that isn’t moving, and you’re fairly sure it’s your fault. Before you book another offsite, let’s talk about what’s actually stopping it.