A Very Millennial Strategy Session

When I joined my new role about a week ago, I braced myself for a classic strategy session. I pictured crisp agendas, long PowerPoint presentations, and a strict focus on targets, forecasts, and corporate jargon. Serious faces around a boardroom table. Coffee cups cooling as everyone strained the nerves in their brains trying to solve all the organisational problems in one session. In short—everything formal, everything by the book.

To my surprise, our department’s strategy session was nothing like that. It was, in the best possible way, very millennial. Picture less corporate bootcamp and more group therapy meets brainstorm meets wellness retreat. And honestly? It was invigorating.

Instead of diving straight into programmes and KPIs, we began with people. The facilitators, mostly young professionals under 35, understood something that many organisations still miss: creativity, innovation, and sustainable productivity don’t come from rigid structures alone. They come from safe, connected, and motivated teams.

Our conversations were not just the “what are our Q3 deliverables” type, but the “what really matters to us as people” type. We talked about balance, mental health, being socially conscious, and how respect for differences isn’t just HR-speak—it’s fuel for better collaboration. It felt more like a safe circle than a boardroom, and that was exactly the point.

We kicked off with icebreakers. Not the awkward, forced kind, but activities that made us laugh, relax, and see each other as more than job titles. We swapped stories about what energises us outside of work and even touched on how we balance our personal and professional lives. That spirit of openness created a foundation of trust before we even touched the “serious” agenda.

What struck me most was honesty in the conversations. There was space for vulnerability, where people admitted what challenges they’d faced, and for celebration, where colleagues highlighted each other’s strengths. We spoke about how our diverse experiences and ways of working could be harnessed rather than hidden. The emphasis was not just on being good professionals, but on being good humans working alongside other humans.

And here’s the interesting part: once the energy was lightened, the spirits lifted, and the room warmed with genuine connection, we shifted gears into the technical side of strategy. Business development. Targets. Future plans. The “real work.”

But this time, creativity and innovation poured out effortlessly. Ideas flowed faster than iced lattes from Starbucks! Solutions were more imaginative. People spoke up without hesitation. There was less fear of being wrong, more curiosity about what might be possible. 

That’s when I realised the brilliance of the approach. By prioritising people first, the team had unlocked a deeper level of productivity and commitment. This wasn’t about wasting time with fun before work, it was about laying the groundwork that allowed the work to thrive.

In a world where “millennial” is sometimes used as shorthand for entitled or unserious, this session proved the opposite. It showed the strength of a generation that values balance, humanity, and social consciousness, and channels those values into meaningful, results-driven work, and that’s the secret sauce to a highly productive team.

I walked away with two lessons. First: strategy is not just about plans on paper—it’s about the energy and mindset of the people who will execute them. Second: when you let people be people first, the business outcomes follow naturally.

So yes, call it millennial if you want. We did our icebreakers, we cared about work-life balance, especially all our fur babies who we shared pictures of, and we even acknowledged feelings and personality types (gasp). But we also walked out with clearer goals, stronger buy-in, and a team that felt unstoppable.