The final slide hangs in the air, a constellation of circles and arrows labeled ‘Synergistic Flywheels’ and ‘Value Pillars.’ The CEO’s voice drops to a reverent hush. A single person starts clapping, which triggers a wave of obligatory applause that fills the stale, recycled air of the conference room. It feels…important. We spent
$171,001
on this offsite, after all. The facilitator, with his sharp suit and even sharper smile, beams as if he’s just witnessed the birth of a new religion. We have a plan. We have a 41-page deck that proves it. It has a name: ‘Vision 2031.’
And tomorrow morning, absolutely nothing will change. The sales team will still be fighting with marketing over lead quality. Engineering will still be battling the technical debt from 2021. The most Vision 2031 will ever do is serve as a file name someone stumbles across in a year, prompting a vague, “Oh yeah… what ever happened with that?”
I used to get angry about this. I used to believe the failure was in the execution. That people were too lazy, too resistant, too mired in the day-to-day to embrace the beautiful, logical future we had so carefully architected on laminated posters. I once championed a plan, a glorious 101-page digital transformation strategy, my personal masterpiece. I had flowcharts. I had timelines broken down into 21-day sprints. I had stakeholder matrices that were, if I’m honest, works of art. I presented it with the fire of a true believer. The applause was real that day. And
11 months later, the SharePoint analytics showed it had been accessed exactly
21 times.
11 of those were me.
A Plan, or a Tranquilizer?
That failure taught me something it took a long time to admit. The world is chaotic and unpredictable, a terrifying storm of variables. The 41-page deck is an incantation against that chaos, a collective agreement to pretend the future is a neat series of bullet points. It’s a temporary peace treaty between department heads, a ceremonial division of budget and relevance that allows everyone to go back to their silos with a renewed, if fictional, sense of purpose.
The Adaptive Algorithm: A Different Path
I find myself thinking about a man I read about, Muhammad G., whose job title is something you’d never see in a corporation: a video game difficulty balancer. His work is the antithesis of the static five-year plan. When you’re playing a game he’s worked on, the system is watching you. If you’re struggling, it might subtly reduce the number of enemies in the next room. If you’re breezing through, it might give a boss
11% more health.
Adaptive Core
A living, breathing algorithm that adapts in real-time.
The ‘plan’ isn’t a document; it’s a living, breathing algorithm that adapts in real-time to the single most important factor: the user’s actual experience. Muhammad isn’t trying to predict the player’s behavior over the next 51 hours of gameplay. He is building a responsive system. He deals in reality, not prophecy.
Prophecies
Fixed in ink, ignored by Monday.
Reality
Adaptive, responsive, real-time.
That’s the difference. We build prophecies. We anoint ourselves as seers, spending weeks debating the precise wording of a mission statement that will be ignored by Monday. The entire exercise is a grand act of architectural hubris. We’re like builders in the
11th century
trying to design a cathedral down to the last gargoyle before the first stone is even laid, forgetting that these magnificent structures were built over generations, with plans adapting to new materials, changing tastes, and the simple, grounding reality of gravity. The grandson of the original architect would look at the initial sketches and laugh, adapting them to what was now possible, what was now needed. The vision was a direction, not a destination fixed in ink.
The Ceremony of Planning vs. The Reality of Doing
Our modern corporate rituals are obsessed with the ink. The document is the deliverable. The applause is the metric of success. The real work, the messy, adaptive, moment-to-moment balancing act that Muhammad G. does, is too unpredictable. It can’t be captured in a
Gantt chart.
It doesn’t fit neatly onto a slide with
11 pillars.
It requires a terrifying amount of trust and a willingness to say, “I don’t know what Q3 of next year looks like, but I know what we need to fix right now.”
I shouldn’t be so cynical. I know that. It’s just that yesterday I found myself in a meeting, a very important one, and I could feel a yawn building in my chest like a pressure wave. I fought it, of course. I bit my tongue. I focused intently on the speaker, who was explaining a new paradigm for customer engagement. But the exhaustion was not from lack of sleep. It was a deep, soul-level weariness from seeing the same patterns, the same performative acts of planning that yield the same negligible results.
The problem isn’t that people don’t care; it’s that they’ve been trained to value the ceremony of planning over the reality of doing. The most valuable services, the ones people actually integrate into their lives, rarely come with a 41-page user manual explaining their five-year vision. They solve an immediate, tangible problem with elegant simplicity. No one wants to read a whitepaper on the future of entertainment consumption; they just want to watch their show, without buffering, tonight. They want an
that works, full stop.
We’ve conflated the two. We believe that declaring our intent with enough PowerPoint slides is the same as delivering a result. The truth is that the 41-page deck isn’t for the company. It’s for the board. It’s for the investors. It’s an artifact of compliance. The real strategy, the one that actually determines success or failure, exists in the thousand tiny decisions made every day by people who are too busy working to read the official plan. It’s in the support agent who decides to spend an extra
11 minutes
with a frustrated customer. It’s in the engineer who chooses to fix a small, annoying bug instead of starting the next ‘strategic’ feature. It’s in the sales manager who adjusts the team’s targets based on a sudden market shift, without waiting for the next quarterly planning cycle.
Beyond the Plan: Embracing Reality
This is the great contradiction I now live with: I hate the strategic planning process, but I understand the human need for it. It’s a security blanket. But we have to stop pretending it’s a tool for navigation. Its value, if any, is in forcing a conversation. It’s the act of arguing over the pillars, the flywheels, and the mission statement that creates temporary alignment. The document itself is just the exhaust fumes of that process. A picture of the meal, not the nourishment itself.
Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to create a better plan. Maybe it should be to create more resilient, responsive teams that don’t need one. Teams that, like Muhammad G.’s difficulty algorithm, can sense and respond. We measure adherence to the plan, a fundamentally flawed metric because it punishes adaptation. What if we measured the speed of our response to the unexpected? What if the only ‘pillar’ was a commitment to reality, in all its messy, unpredictable, and un-slide-worthy glory?