Last month, the team took our annual offsite to Echigo-Yuzawa, a ski town in Niigata Prefecture about 75 minutes from Tokyo by Shinkansen.
The location was a deliberate choice, not just a scenic one. Close enough that the whole team could get there in under an hour and a half without eating into the trip with travel fatigue, but far enough, and different enough in climate and pace, to actually leave Tokyo behind. Yuzawa sits in one of Japan’s heaviest snowfall regions, and there’s something useful about a change in physical environment that stark when the goal is to get a team out of its day-to-day headspace.
We split the time deliberately between three things: decompressing, aligning, and deciding.
The first day was mostly unstructured, onsen, snow, no agenda. That part matters more than it sounds. A team that’s been heads-down on client work for months needs actual downtime before it can think clearly about strategy, not a tightly packed schedule that just relocates the same pace to a nicer room.
The second day was where the real work happened: reviewing the past year honestly, including what hadn’t worked, and getting everyone in the same room to align on direction for the year ahead rather than negotiating it over email across time zones. Several decisions that had been circling for months got resolved in a single afternoon simply because the whole team was sitting at the same table with no calendar pressure.
We’ve kept the offsite as an annual fixture for a reason. Strategy conversations move differently in person, and they move even better somewhere that doesn’t feel like the office.
We are looking forward to next February when we will repeat the offsite and get even better, fresher and deeper ideas about out Intertangible future.