It’s Executive Offsite season. This year has set a new record at Interchange with thirteen multi-day off-sites between September and November and counting.

When you’re in the room with so many different top leadership teams, spanning healthcare, retail, construction, finance, transport, energy, and government, you start to see the patterns that reveal where Executive leadership is at right now.

It’s also reminded me how few people ever get to peek behind the curtain of what happens in these forums. I often hear the CEO say “I always get told after these things that it is a mystery to the broader team what we do in here, even though I think I communicate it pretty well”. I get that, what people are really saying is “I wish I was a fly on the wall”. The conversations are rich, complex and deeply human. While confidentiality is critical when working with Exec Teams, the collective insights are worth sharing, if only to let you be that fly for the time it takes to read this blog post :)

So, here’s five themes I’m noticing at the top table this season:

Artificial Intelligence
AI has fundamentally changed the game. Some organisations are still working out what to do with it. Others have already started to separate “task” work from “thought” work. And a few are completely re-shaping how their org functions. The phrase ‘peak employment’ has surfaced a bit. It’s the idea that we’ve reached the highest number of people we’ll ever employ, and future growth will come from a hybrid human-tech model.

Team Dynamics
Then there’s leadership itself. Executives are asking to go deeper into the team dynamics that have been hiding in plain sight. For decades, we’ve fixated on the individual leader; their style, their mindset, their growth edge, but ELT's are coming to realise that the real performance story often lives in the collective. The best teams are hungry to understand their shared patterns and recalibrate them before they slow progress down. The pace of change is too great to leave this unexamined.

Strategy Horizons
Strategy conversations have also shifted. Last season, almost everyone was working on a three- or five-year plan. This year, I’m seeing a move to a two-year practical horizon, paired with a ten-year outlook. It’s a clever balance, the ten-year view keeps the thinking ambitious, while the two-year plan makes it real for people and relatable for boards.

Customer
Customer focus is coming in stronger and earlier. Where I used to have to ask, “What does your customer actually need, not what do you think they want?”, many Exec Teams are now arriving with data in hand, ready to test and challenge assumptions. It’s a shift from intuition to insight.

Purpose
And finally, purpose. The high-performing organisations are orienting around it more tightly than ever. Their ‘why’ is their compass. It shapes the agenda, frames the debate and brings the enterprise view into the room. Where purpose is clear, you can feel the energy lift.

So there you go, the seasons insights wrapped up. Now, fly fly away and get some work done ;)