When a CEO and I sit down to plan their first Strategic Ascent offsite, one of the earliest conversations we have is about who's going to be in the room. It sounds like a logistics question. It isn't. The composition of your Strategy Team is one of the most consequential decisions you'll make in this whole process, and it's one most CEOs instinctively get wrong on the first pass.
Their instinct is to be inclusive. They want their full leadership team there, plus a few high-potential people they're developing, plus the head of a critical function, plus someone from the board. Before you know it, the list is at twelve or fifteen names. I understand the impulse. No one wants to leave a smart leader on the sidelines. But strategic planning isn't a recognition exercise. It's a decision-making exercise, and the size and shape of the room directly determines whether real decisions get made.
After running this process for a long time, we've landed on a clear answer.
Six to eight people is ideal. Eight to ten is manageable. Above ten, you're running a different kind of meeting.
Here's why those numbers hold. Strategic planning at the level we run it requires every person in the room to engage in hard, sometimes uncomfortable conversations: debating tradeoffs, pushing back on the CEO's stake in the sand, reconciling competing priorities, and ultimately committing.
With six to eight people, every voice is heard, every perspective gets weighed, and the team can converge on real decisions inside two days. At eight to ten, the same is possible, but people have less time to speak. Above ten, the dynamic shifts. Conversations become presentations. The people with the strongest functional opinions dominate, and the quieter, often more strategic voices get crowded out. You leave the room with a document, less of a set of decisions.
But the right number alone doesn't guarantee the right room. I worked with a CEO who came into the process with a list of fifteen people he wanted at the offsite. We worked through it together, and he made the hard calls. By the time we got to the design document, he was down to eight. That's a manageable number, and on paper it looked right.
Once we were in the room, though, it became clear that one of those nine wasn't sophisticated enough to be there. Their thinking stayed at the operational level when the rest of the team was working at the strategic level. Their answers were long and rarely landed on a point, and their questions kept pulling us off course. At several moments, the discussion was effectively hijacked. The team got there in the end, but the process was slower and more frustrating than it needed to be, and the CEO and I both knew exactly why.
That experience reinforced something I tell every CEO now: you can have the right number and still have the wrong room.
Numbers aside, the harder question is who. Here's the lens we use in Strategic Ascent engagements.
1. They report to the CEO. Everyone in the room should report directly to the CEO. If there are people in the room who are another layer down it introduces performance and politics instead of the honest discussion we need.
2. They can decide, not just contribute. The Strategy Team is the group that will set direction for the company. That means leaders who carry decision-making authority in their part of the business and who can speak credibly across the whole. Pure subject matter experts, no matter how strong, usually don't belong in the room. Their input is better captured through pre-work and goal team participation later.
3. They can wear an enterprise hat. This is one I push hard on. The Strategy Team has to be able to take their functional hats off and think about what's best for the whole business, not what's best for their department's headcount, budget, or scope. People who can't do that, however senior, will pull the room toward operational debates and away from strategy.
Choosing your Strategy Team is one of the highest-leverage decisions of the process. It's the foundation that sets your offsite up for success. Get it right and the team gets to the right strategic goals. Get it wrong and you'll feel it in every conversation and see it in the end result.
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