The fan on the ceiling of the boardroom has been clicking for 106 minutes, a rhythmic, plastic snap that punctuates the silence after the CEO finishes speaking. My hand is cramped. My fingers are stained with the blue ink of a pen I found in the lobby, and I can feel the salt of the catered pretzels on my tongue. We are looking at a slide titled ‘2026 Horizons,’ a blue-and-white gradient that represents 236 hours of my life I will never get back. There are 16 of us in the room, and I am fairly certain that 6 of us are currently composing grocery lists in our heads. The document, a PDF that spans 106 pages, is a masterpiece of corporate fiction. It is beautiful. It is comprehensive. It is also, for all intents and purposes, dead.

We pretend that by putting arrows on a PowerPoint, we can direct the winds of global commerce. We are cartographers drawing maps of a continent that is still shifting under our feet, and we are doing it with the misplaced confidence of Victorian explorers.

Laura C.M. would hate this room. She is a piano tuner I met back in 1996, a woman who understands that you cannot force a string to be in tune by simply declaring that it should be.

– The Piano Tuner’s Truth

When Laura walks into a room with a Steinway, she doesn’t bring a 56 page slide deck. She brings a tuning hammer and a set of mutes. She listens to the 446 Hz vibration of the A4 key and she adjusts the tension until the physical reality matches the mathematical ideal. There is no ‘visioning’ in piano tuning. There is only the vibration, the metal, and the ear. If she ignores the reality of the wood, the piano doesn’t play better because she had a great strategy; it simply snaps.

The Tension of the Strings

In corporate planning, we have lost the ability to feel the tension of the strings. We have replaced the actual work of adjustment with the theater of projection. We spent 26 days debating the wording of a single bullet point regarding ‘synergistic growth,’ while the actual customers were already migrating to a competitor because our login page takes 6 seconds too long to load. The disconnect is staggering.

We are polishing the brass on the Titanic while the iceberg is currently being livestreamed on TikTok.

We create these documents because we are terrified of the alternative: admiting we don’t know what is going to happen. Uncertainty is a monster that lives under the boardroom table, and the ‘2026 Vision’ PDF is the nightlight we keep plugged in to keep it at bay.

The Organism vs. The Machine

This reveals a profound inability to embrace the messy, chaotic nature of reality. We prefer the clean lines of a Gantt chart to the jagged edges of a pivot. But businesses aren’t machines; they are organisms. And you don’t ‘strategize’ the growth of an oak tree; you plant it in good soil, you give it water, and you get out of the way.

We, however, would rather spend 66 hours debating the tree’s five-year height target than actually checking the pH of the soil. There is a specific kind of grief in seeing a document you poured your soul into sit unopened for 6 months. It’s like writing a novel that only the editor reads, and even then, they only read the summary.

Tangible Permanence

Perhaps the frustration stems from our desire for the tangible. In a world of fleeting digital assets and shifting corporate priorities, we crave something that actually stays where we put it. This is why I find myself increasingly drawn to things that occupy physical space with intention.

I remember looking at the architectural specs for Sola Spaces and realizing that a well-placed sunroom has a higher strategic value for a person’s sanity than a three-year roadmap. A sunroom is an admission that the light is important. It is a structure built to invite the world in, rather than a strategy deck built to keep the chaos out. One is a sanctuary; the other is a shield.

Maintenance as Strategy

Strategy should be the same. It shouldn’t be a monolith we build once a year; it should be a set of tools we use every morning to make sure we are still vibrating at the right frequency. But that would require us to stop performing. It would require us to admit that the $1256 we spent on those leather-bound ‘Vision’ notebooks was a waste of money.

Stopping the Wave

I think about that person waving at the coffee shop. I think about my own arm, hanging in the air, caught in the mid-motion of a mistake. There is a brief moment of intense vulnerability when you realize you’ve misread the situation. But in that moment, there is also a choice. You can double down and keep waving, pretending you meant to greet the mailbox across the street, or you can laugh, drop your hand, and turn around.

We need to stop treating the strategy deck as a functional tool and start seeing it for what it is: a security blanket for the C-suite. The work is in the 6 conversations you have with frustrated clients every week. The work is in the 106 small adjustments you make to the product when you notice a friction point. The work is in the tension, not the projection.

Setting the Light

I left the boardroom while the others were still arguing over the shade of blue for the ‘Next Steps’ slide. I walked out into the hallway and looked at the clock. It was 4:56 PM. Outside, the sun was hitting the windows of the building across the street, creating a blinding, honest glare.

I thought about Laura C.M. and her tuning hammer. We spend so much time trying to predict the light that we forget to sit in it. We are so busy planning the ‘2026 Horizons’ that we haven’t noticed the sun has already set on today. And as I walked toward the elevator, I didn’t feel like a strategist. I felt like a piano that had been left in the rain for 46 years, finally realizing that the only way to get back in tune was to stop pretending I was already there.