TL;DR: Most leadership retreats measure success with a same-day satisfaction survey: how attendees felt on the last afternoon, before they have gone back to a real calendar. That number predicts almost nothing about whether anything changed. Root Astro is designing its measurement the other way: a six-dimension self-assessment called The Instrument, taken at the retreat and retaken 90 days later (the Day-90 Reading), plus a separate rubric built from two validated academic scales, not a homemade questionnaire. A same-day smile sheet cannot tell you what changed 90 days out. Only a second reading can.
The corporate wellness industry has repeated a version of the same claim for two decades: every dollar spent returns three to six dollars in reduced healthcare costs and higher productivity. The most rigorous test of that claim found the opposite. The University of Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a large randomized controlled trial published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Jones, Molitor, and Reif, 2019), tracked thousands of employees at a real employer for a year and found no significant effect on medical spending, health outcomes, or productivity from a standard workplace wellness program, despite genuine short-term gains in self-reported healthy behavior.
That does not mean retreats or coaching do not work. It means an end-of-event smile sheet cannot tell you whether they did. Self-reported mood at the close of a good three days is one of the least durable metrics available, because everyone feels better after three days away from their inbox. The question that matters is what is different in week 13, not day 3.
Six dimensions of a leader's operating state, the same framework used throughout the retreat programming. Taken on arrival and again at Day 90 (the Day-90 Reading). Root Astro's own methodology, designed to be retaken and compared, not just filled out once.
Psychological recovery (detachment, relaxation, mastery, control) and team psychological safety, taken alongside The Instrument at intake and Day 90. Built on two independently validated academic scales: the Recovery Experience Questionnaire (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007) and Amy Edmondson's Team Psychological Safety Scale (Edmondson, 1999).
Same-day satisfaction or Net Promoter Score, taken once, at the end of the event, usually with a custom survey that has no peer-reviewed basis and no re-test.
The difference is not the color of the chart. It is whether the same instrument gets used twice, on the same person, with 90 days of real work in between.
Every leader who comes through a Bearing retreat (the flagship 3.5-day format, cohorts of 6 to 10 leaders, $7,600 per seat) will leave with the 90-Day Bearing: a structured plan, not a keepsake. It is designed to carry the Instrument readings forward into a working document, set goals against the Truth, Health, Wealth framework, and schedule the actual re-test. At Day 90, the leader retakes The Instrument and the Human Return Rubric. The comparison between the two readings, not the leader's memory of how the retreat felt, is meant to be the outcome data.
This is also why a single overnight stay or a one-day offsite cannot run this model. Measuring change requires two points 90 days apart and a structured plan connecting them. A one-day program has nowhere to put the second reading.
Not yet. Root Astro opens in May 2027 and has run no cohorts so far, so there is no outcome data to publish, and none will be invented or implied before it exists. What is already built and live is the measurement design itself: the Human Return Rubric on the Enterprise page, and the Instrument-plus-Day-90 structure described here. As with any measurement built on academic scales rather than a marketing survey, the honest expectation going in is that outcomes will vary by leader.
A 16-item, peer-reviewed psychological scale (Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007) measuring four components of genuine recovery from work stress: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery experiences, and control. It is widely used in organizational psychology research, independent of any retreat or wellness company.
A validated 7-item scale (Edmondson, 1999) measuring whether a team feels safe to take interpersonal risks, most famously used in Google's internal Project Aristotle research on team effectiveness.
It is the most rigorous available test of the "wellness pays for itself" claim that much of the industry still repeats, and it found no measurable effect after one year. Citing it against our own model is the point: if a measurement claim cannot survive the same scrutiny, it should not be made.
Sources: Jones, D., Molitor, D., and Reif, J. (2019), "What Do Workplace Wellness Programs Do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study," Quarterly Journal of Economics. Sonnentag, S., and Fritz, C. (2007), "The Recovery Experience Questionnaire," Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Edmondson, A. (1999), "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Administrative Science Quarterly.
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