The Illusion of Precision

The laser pointer is jittering against the beige wall of the boardroom, a tiny red dot dancing over a bullet point that claims we will achieve ‘Market Dominance via Ecosystem Harmonization’ by the year 2039. Henderson, our CEO, has been talking for 29 minutes, and his voice has reached that specific frequency of rehearsed passion that makes the hair on my arms stand up in a defensive crouch. I am not looking at the screen. I am focused entirely on a microscopic smudge on the upper left corner of my phone, rubbing it with a grey microfiber cloth in slow, rhythmic circles. It is a stubborn bit of grease. It mocks my need for clarity.

In my line of work-investigating insurance claims that usually involve someone ‘accidentally’ driving a luxury SUV into a swimming pool-clarity is the only currency that doesn’t depreciate. But here, in the glow of the 19th slide of the morning, clarity has been taken out back and quietly dealt with.

The Paper Strategy vs. The Real Ash

I remember a case back in ’19. A small-time developer claimed a total loss on a warehouse that supposedly housed 999 vintage sewing machines. On paper, it was a tragedy. The spreadsheets were immaculate. The inventory list was 19 pages long, detailed down to the serial numbers. But when I actually walked the site, the ash didn’t smell like burning metal and grease. It smelled like old newspapers. He’d built a paper strategy for a payout, never intending to actually own the machines.

Corporate strategy often feels like that warehouse. We build the inventory list-the ‘Core Pillars,’ the ‘Value Propositions,’ the ‘Operational Synergies’-to satisfy the board, to feel like we are in control of a chaotic universe. We want to believe that if we name the future, it will behave itself. But the future doesn’t care about our 9 key initiatives. It has its own plans, usually involving a global pandemic or a sudden shift in consumer taste that makes our ‘Ecosystem Harmonization’ look like a collection of 8-track tapes in a Spotify world.

Alignment as Collective Blindness

There is a profound, almost tectonic disconnect between the view from the 19th floor and the view from the cubicle where the actual work happens. Up there, strategy is a game of Risk, played with colorful icons and sweeping arrows. Down here, the work is about whether the software crashes when you hit ‘save’ or whether the client in sector 9 is going to scream at the receptionist because their policy hasn’t been updated. When Henderson talks about ‘Pillar 9: Radical Transparency,’ he doesn’t realize that the people on the floor have already developed a cynical immune response. They see the strategy as a weather event-a storm they have to hunker down for until it passes and the next ‘Vision’ replaces it in 2029.

I’ve seen this pattern in 49 different companies across three different industries. The leadership team disappears into a resort for a weekend-let’s call it a $9,999 retreat-and they come back ‘aligned.’ Alignment is a dangerous word. It usually means they’ve all agreed to ignore the same problems. They mistake the document for the destination. It’s like a tourist who spends their entire vacation looking at the guidebook and never actually looks at the architecture. If you want to know where a company is going, don’t look at their strategy deck; look at where they spend their money when they think no one is watching. Look at the 19 small decisions made by the floor managers every morning. That is the real strategy. The rest is just theater for the shareholders.

The Need for Actionable Terrain

I find myself thinking about how we navigate real spaces versus conceptual ones. When you are actually on the ground, trying to find your way through a complex, living environment, you don’t need a philosophical treatise on the nature of navigation. You need a tool that reflects the reality of what is in front of you.

Corporate strategy fails because it lacks this ‘zoo-guide’ mentality. It is built by people who aren’t in the cages. It’s built by people who have forgotten the smell of the tigers. My phone screen is finally clean now. The smudge is gone, replaced by a reflection of the fluorescent lights above. I look up and realize Henderson is still on slide 19. He’s talking about ‘leveraging our human capital.’ In my world, ‘human capital’ is a phrase used by people who are about to commit a very specific kind of fraud-the kind where you stop seeing people as people and start seeing them as line items on a loss-adjustment form. It’s a way of distancing yourself from the consequences of a bad plan.

There was a woman I interviewed 9 years ago who had lost her business in a flood. She didn’t have a 49-page strategic plan. She had a notebook with the names of her 19 best customers and their favorite orders. When the water rose, she didn’t look at her ‘Vision Statement.’ She grabbed the notebook. She knew that her strategy was the relationship, not the building. The building was just where the strategy happened to live for a while. Our leadership team has it backwards. They think the building-the structure of the plan-is the business. They have become so enamored with the elegance of the 9 pillars that they’ve forgotten to check if the ground beneath them is made of solid rock or shifting silt.

The Strategy of the Frayed Napkin

I’ve made mistakes in my assessments before. I once wrote off a claim as fraudulent because the math didn’t add up, only to realize later that the claimant was just incredibly bad at accounting, not a criminal. I can admit when my cynicism gets the better of me. But with these strategic plans, the math never adds up. You cannot take 109 disparate personalities, give them a 49-page PDF, and expect them to march in a straight line toward 2039. It’s a biological impossibility. Humans are messy. We are distracted. We are currently cleaning our phone screens while the boss talks about ‘Synergy.’

If we really wanted a strategy that worked, it would be 9 sentences long. It would be written on the back of a napkin, and it would focus on the one thing we actually do better than the 19 competitors currently eating our lunch. It would be a living document, something that gets dirty, something that gets passed around the breakroom until the edges are frayed. It would be a guide, not a manifesto. But a napkin doesn’t justify a $49,999 consulting fee. A napkin doesn’t make a CEO feel like a visionary. And so, we sit. We listen to the drone of the projector. We watch the red dot dance over words like ‘Paradigm Shift’ and ‘Value Chain Integration.’

Henderson finally clicks to the 39th slide. He’s wrapping up. He looks tired, actually. For a second, the mask of the visionary slips, and I see a man who is just as terrified of the future as the 109 people in the room. He needs this plan to be real because if it isn’t, then he’s just a man in a $1,999 suit standing in a dark room talking to himself. I feel a brief flash of sympathy, the kind I feel for the guys who burn down their own warehouses because they don’t know how else to pay the mortgage. It’s a desperate act of creation through destruction.

The Aftermath and the Clean Screen

The meeting ends at 11:59 AM. We all stand up, the air in the room thick with the collective relief of a released breath. As I walk out, I see the recycling bin by the door. It is already half-full of the printed handouts of the ‘Vision 2039’ deck. By the time the 9th person leaves the room, the strategy will have been officially discarded by the very people expected to execute it.

I pull my phone out. The screen is perfect. Not a single smudge. If only the rest of the world could be cleaned so easily with a bit of microfiber and some persistence. I head toward my car, thinking about that developer from ’19 and his 999 sewing machines. He never did get his payout. The insurance company-my employers-knew that a plan that looks too perfect on paper is usually just a way to hide the fact that there’s nothing left in the building but old news.