£50k offsite. Zero decisions.

Your offsite was a waste of money.

I know. You had a facilitator. You had breakout groups. You had a photographer who took seventeen shots of the sticky note wall and made them look like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Forty people flew in. Two days in a country hotel with good coffee and bad Wi-Fi. Groups were formed. Insights were generated. Clusters were clustered. Themes were themed. Everyone dot-voted on everything. A Miro board was created. The Miro board was shared with three hundred people who weren't there.

And on Monday morning, the same twelve people who were already running the project went back to their desks and carried on doing exactly what they were doing before.

Nothing changed. But it felt like something did. And that's worse than doing nothing — because now nobody thinks there's a problem.

Alignment theatre is the most expensive habit in corporate delivery.

Not because people are faking it. Because people genuinely believe they have it. The room felt good. The conversation was productive. Heads were nodded. The photographer got a lovely shot of the CEO pointing at a Post-it.

But nodding isn't deciding. And "broadly aligned" isn't aligned at all. It's a polite way of saying nobody wanted to be the person who slowed things down by asking the awkward question.

The awkward question

Here it is: what exactly are we deciding today, and how will we know we've decided it?

Nobody asks it. Because asking it means someone in the room has to admit they don't actually know what this project is for. And admitting that in front of forty people in a hotel conference room with name badges and a photographer is not something most senior leaders are prepared to do.

So instead, you get agreement. Broad, warm, useless agreement. The kind that survives exactly as long as the drive home.

"Are we aligned on the vision?" Yes. Obviously. Who's going to say no in front of the group?

"What exactly are we building, for whom, and how will we know it worked?" Silence. Awkward looks. Someone suggests a smaller breakout session.

That silence is where the actual work lives. And most organisations will spend any amount of money to avoid it.

The Decision Sentence

Move 1 in VOLTS is Visualise & Align. Its output is a Decision Sentence — one line the room can repeat back accurately. Not a strategy. Not a Miro board. Not a purpose statement laminated on the kitchen wall.

One sentence: "We are [doing what] for [whom] so that [measurable outcome]."

It takes ten minutes. It doesn't require a facilitator, a photographer, or a two-day offsite in a country hotel.

It does require someone to ask the question nobody wants to answer. Which is why most teams never write one.

The bit nobody wants to hear

Writing the Decision Sentence isn't the hard part. The hard part is reading it aloud and watching two people in the room realise they've been working to different goals for a month. That moment is uncomfortable. It's also the moment the project actually starts.

Every week you skip that discomfort is a week you're building on a foundation that doesn't exist.

One thing to try this week

Cancel your next alignment workshop. I'm serious.

Instead, put thirty minutes in a room with the five people who actually make decisions on the project. Ask each of them to write one sentence — independently, no conferring — describing what this project is for and what success looks like.

Read the sentences aloud.

If they match, your project is in better shape than 90% of the ones I've seen. Carry on.

If they don't, you just learned something in half an hour that the workshop would have papered over in two days.