Peering through the blue-tinted lens of her glasses, Elena S.-J. notices a microscopic tear in the CEO’s expensive silk tie just as he begins the presentation for ‘Vision 2038.’ The air in the boardroom has that recycled, metallic tang that only exists in buildings with 48 floors and zero windows that actually open. She is here as a safety compliance auditor, a role that usually involves checking if fire extinguishers are pressurized to the correct 198 psi or if the stairwell railings can withstand 208 pounds of lateral force. Today, however, she is auditing the safety of the company’s logic. Or perhaps its sanity. The CEO clicks his remote, and the first of 58 slides flickers onto the screen, a high-definition image of a mountain climber reaching for a summit that looks suspiciously like a stock photo from 1998.
There is a specific, practiced rhythm to this ritual. Every 18 months, the leadership team retreats to a mountain resort that costs $28,888 per weekend to ‘realign the North Star.’ They return with a 388-page document that claims to predict the global market trajectory for the next decade, yet they cannot seem to predict that the coffee machine in the breakroom will break down every Tuesday at 8:08 AM. Elena watches the heads around the table. There are 18 stakeholders present, and at least 8 of them are checking their phones under the mahogany surface, likely dealing with the actual, screaming crises of the present moment while nodding solemnly at the hypothetical triumphs of 2038. It is a theatrical performance of certainty in a world that is fundamentally, stubbornly chaotic.
The Disconnect: Strategy vs. Necessity
I should probably mention that I just parallel parked my car-a vintage sedan with terrible visibility-perfectly on the first try this morning. It felt like a cosmic alignment, a rare moment where the physical world actually obeyed my intentions. And yet, here I am, watching a man explain how we will capture 48% of a market that doesn’t even exist yet. It’s the same feeling of disconnect I get when I see a safety sign that hasn’t been updated since the 78s. We pretend that the ink on the page creates the reality on the ground. I once spent 8 days auditing a warehouse where the employees had literally built a ‘secret’ breakroom out of shipping pallets because the official one was too far from the loading docks. The strategic blueprint showed a streamlined path of motion; the reality was a labyrinth of human necessity. We build these 5-year fictions because we are terrified of the 6-week truth.
Hypothetical Horizon
Actual Urgency
The Cost: Shielding from Accountability
Strategy, in its corporate form, is an act of shielding. It shields the board from the mess, and it shields the leadership from the accountability of the day-to-day. If you are focused on the 2038 horizon, no one can blame you for the fire in the trash can behind you right now. It is a strange contradiction, really-I spend my life enforcing rigid safety protocols because I believe details matter, yet I find myself completely cynical about these grand, sweeping frameworks. I am the person who insists on 8-point inspections for every harness, but I can’t bring myself to care about the ‘Synergy Pillars’ on slide 28.
What is truly fascinating is the cost of this fiction. Not just the $128,888 spent on consultants who use words like ‘iterative’ and ‘holistic’ as if they were holy incantations, but the psychological cost. When you ask people to commit to a lie, you erode their capacity for truth. If the 488 employees in this building know that ‘Vision 2038’ is just a file that will sit in a shared drive until it is replaced by ‘Vision 2048,’ they learn that long-term thinking is a waste of energy. They learn that the only thing that matters is the theater. It reminds me of a time I audited a chemical plant where the logs showed 100% compliance for 38 consecutive months. It was too perfect. I dug deeper and found that the inspector had simply been copying the previous month’s numbers because the actual testing equipment had been broken since 2008. The plan was the priority; the reality was an inconvenience.
The 100% Compliance Lie (Audit Finding)
Consecutive Months Logged
Equipment Broken Date
The Anchor in Vaporware
We crave permanence in a world of vaporware. This is why people are increasingly looking toward their own immediate surroundings for a sense of stability. While the corporate world pivots and rebrands every 18 weeks, the physical structure of a home remains. There is a profound difference between a slide deck and a structure. This is where companies like
find their relevance. They aren’t selling a five-year projection of ‘lifestyle synergy’; they are providing a physical extension of a person’s reality. A sunroom doesn’t need a quarterly review to prove its value. It doesn’t pivot. It provides a tangible, light-filled space that exists regardless of market fluctuations or leadership changes. It’s an investment in the now, in the actual sunlight hitting your skin, rather than the metaphorical light at the end of a corporate tunnel that is likely just an oncoming train of more meetings.
Tangible Now
Exists regardless of QBRs.
Five-Year Plan
Relies on hypothetical markets.
Investment in Now
Actual sunlight, not metaphorical.
The Coded Language of Deference
Elena notices the CEO has reached slide 38. He is talking about ‘leveraging organic growth.’ I find myself wondering if he knows the word ‘organic’ implies something that can also rot. Last week, I forgot to submit my own mileage report for the 8th time in a row, a mistake that seems trivial until you realize that I am the one who audits others for their attention to detail. We are all hypocrites in the service of a paycheck. I criticize the theater, yet I am sitting here in my best blazer, taking notes on a legal pad that I will probably lose before I reach the parking garage. The plan isn’t for us; it’s for the investors who need to believe that their money is being guided by a map, even if the map is for a country that was submerged by the sea 88 years ago.
“
There is a specific kind of silence that follows the unveiling of a strategic plan. It’s not the silence of awe, but the silence of internal translation. Each person in the room is translating the jargon into their own reality.
‘Global Integration’ means ‘I’ll be on Zoom calls at 8:00 PM.’ ‘Operational Excellence’ means ‘We aren’t hiring any more staff.’ It’s a coded language that everyone speaks but no one acknowledges. If we were honest, the CEO would stand up and say, ‘We have no idea what will happen next year, but we’re going to try really hard to not go bankrupt.’ That would be the safest strategy I’ve ever heard. But honesty doesn’t have a 50-slide deck with transitions.
The Efficient Alternative: Mastering the Present
“They weren’t trying to predict the future; they were mastering the present.”
I remember an audit I did in 2018 at a small manufacturing firm. They didn’t have a 5-year plan. They had a white-board where they wrote the 8 most important things they needed to do that week. If they finished them, they wiped it clean and started over. It was the most efficient, safe, and profitable company I had ever seen. There is a dignity in that. There is a safety in that. When we stop trying to simulate the future, we can finally start inhabiting the current moment.
The Final Glimpse: Being in the Now
As the meeting breaks for an 18-minute coffee hiatus, Elena walks toward the window. From the 48th floor, the cars below look like tiny, frantic beetles. They all have destinations. They all have plans. But from this height, you can see the traffic jams that none of them anticipated. You can see the construction detours and the accidents. The CEO walks up beside her, smelling of expensive cologne and desperation. ‘Big things coming, Elena,’ he says, leaning against the glass that she knows is only 8 millimeters thick. ‘Big things.’ She nods, because that is what her role requires. But she is looking at a small house nestled between two apartment buildings far below. It has a glass-enclosed porch where a person is sitting, perfectly still, reading a book. No slides. No visions. Just a person in a room, surrounded by light, existing in a reality that doesn’t need a strategy to be valid.
We spend so much time architecting the ‘then’ that we forget how to inhabit the ‘now.’ We build fictions of certainty to avoid the vulnerability of the unknown. But the unknown is where the actual work happens. It’s where the 8-hour shift turns into a 12-hour breakthrough. It’s where the mistake leads to the discovery. If we ignored the plan, we might actually find the direction. Maybe that’s the only strategy that ever really works. Everything else is just expensive wallpaper.