I Went to Norway to Unplug. I Came Back Ready.

I just got back from Norway — a trip with little planning and no real sense of how high that mountain was going to go. What we did know was that we had a guide we trusted almost immediately. He earned that early, and it mattered. Our group camped on a sheep preserve along the clear, blue fjords: simple resources, freezing nights, and a group of people who signed up for the journey and found themselves becoming a team along the way.

Norwegians call this friluftsliv — intentional time outdoors. I came home thinking of it as the best strategy offsite I never planned. Somewhere between the kayak, the climb, the cold, and the quiet, I came back with a few reminders about leadership, adaptability, and how real progress gets made — all of which followed me straight back into conversations about innovation at work.

1. Start your journey before you're ready.

We didn’t know the route or the summit before we started. Most agencies don’t either — and that’s okay. You don’t wait for full visibility; you move. The path reveals itself as you climb, and the resources you need tend to show up once you’re already in motion.

2. Constraints are a feature, not a bug.

Minimal gear on a sheep farm makes it clear fast what actually matters. The same is true of tight budgets and procurement cycles. Constraints force focus. They strip away noise. The work gets better when you stop treating limits as obstacles and start treating them as design conditions. Pack only what you need — you might be surprised how little that turns out to be.

3. The summit doesn't care where you came from.

The solo travelers on that mountain came from all walks of life — finance, government, healthcare, and there are a few stories about the bricklayer. Different countries, different careers, completely different reasons for being there. But that weekend, they all showed up to the same fjord to do the same hard thing. That kind of alignment doesn't happen because of shared background. It happens because of shared commitment to something worth doing. The best cross-sector work feels exactly like that.

4. Deliberate beats fast.

Norway isn't slow — it's intentional. There's a difference. Speed without direction burns energy. Deliberation focuses it. The strongest modernization efforts I've seen know exactly which mode they're in, and when to choose it. Slow is a pace. Intentional is a choice. Only one of them gets you to the summit.

What I didn't expect was how much harder it is to maintain that mindset once you're back in the office. Mountains make clarity feel obvious; calendars, meetings, and inboxes don't. But that contrast is the point. The goal isn't to bottle the feeling of Norway — it's to keep finding small ways to recreate it: moments where you slow down enough to see what actually matters and move with intention. That's the headspace I'm bringing into whatever comes next. I don't know exactly what that looks like yet.

What I know is that I'm more clear-eyed, more deliberate, and more ready to accomplish hard things than I was before I left.