Business travel (incentive travel): a luxury tool for bringing managers together on company trips

Business travel, known more widely as incentive travel, is now going through a deep transformation. For years the corporate standard was trips built on extreme sports and artificially staged games. While such solutions may work at lower levels of the structure, in the case of management (C-level) they become entirely pointless and often plainly irritating. Leaders who function day to day in an environment of enormous pressure do not need further injections of adrenaline. The real, contemporary luxury in business team-building is providing them with a quietened space for building trust.

The crisis of surface relationships in boardrooms

Research on the psychology of work in top-level teams gives unambiguous proof: a surface acquaintance does not translate into business effectiveness. The groundbreaking Project Aristotle carried out by Google showed that the most important factor deciding a team's success is not the individual IQ of its members but the level of psychological safety. That means the ability to admit mistakes openly and to share worries.

Unfortunately, on company trips managers often fall into the clutches of the phenomenon of continuous partial attention, checking their phones ceaselessly. Traditional evenings lead to shallow networking, which in the face of a real crisis provides no binding at all. If an organization does not supply its leaders with the right tools, the trip becomes merely an expensive excursion with no measurable return on investment.

An intellectual alibi in the world of business

To break the barrier of professional distance and provoke a board into constructive reflection, it is worth moving the center of gravity onto the right tools. An outstanding solution, in the current of corporate gifting with class, is to use Odoardo Alibi™ sets during trips. Instead of forcing directors into uncomfortable exercises, you place on the table a heavy box made of solid oak.

When, in a quietened space, managers reach for the cards, they gain cover from awkwardness. The questions let the human side of leaders show. The abstract graphics make analytical minds aware of the meaning of silence and image in communication. The form stimulates active listening in a relationship, building foundations of trust for the coming quarters. On choosing a property where technology does not get in the way, we write in the piece Architecture for the lens.

Reclaiming attention as a competitive advantage

The need to cut oneself off from the virtual world in favor of real alliances in business is commented on by the creator of the Odoardo™ ecosystem:

Using Odoardo Alibi™ is an investment in every corporation's most important asset – the cohesion of its leaders. Sessions free of notifications turn a group into a trusted team, and that shelters companies from the decision-paralyzing “it will work out” trap. The visual layer of conference rooms is worth completing with the Odoardo Art™ collection, described in the piece Art in the chief executive's office.

The properties where such trips make sense we compare in Odoardo™ research. Why we believe trust in a team cannot be hurried along with entertainment, we explain in the manifesto.