Tackling big challenges? Get out of the office

Imagine your inbox empty, your calendar clear, your to-dos checked. With undivided attention, you and your senior team head into the conference room, ready to address the big issues over a daylong meeting. Big issues like determining how you’ll respond to AI, setting your three-to-five-year strategy or nailing down how you’ll attract and develop future talent. Keep imagining. Because that day isn’t coming. The reality looks more like this: you’ve got 60 minutes to plan strategy, in a meeting that took six weeks to schedule. Right before it started, you learned about the crisis of the day. Tonight you have to prepare for a board presentation. Your other execs are all checking their phones, brows furrowed. Everyone ready? Why you need space It’s nearly impossible to solve complex challenges in the course of a normal workday. That’s because workplace stress interferes with the brain functions that support strategic thinking. We’re adept at deep thinking, collaboration and problem solving, in the right conditions. That’s not the case when we’re under the constant pressure and distractions of daily work. We need to get out of the office. While stress inhibits beneficial brain mechanisms, the intentional space you create with a strategic offsite activates them. These leadership meetings create physical and mental distance that sharpens focus, increases psychological safety and motivates people to share ideas—conditions that don’t flourish in sessions crammed into the day. Reducing “attention residue” You can’t switch gears the minute a strategic meeting starts. That previous task? It continues humming in the background, using up cognitive resources needed to plan for the future. Dr. Sophie Leroy, the dean of University of Washington Bothell’s business school, coined the term “attention residue” to describe how part of your attention lingers on the prior activity. We’re most susceptible to it when we leave tasks unfinished or get interrupted. Basically, w