The Silence of Broken Commitments

I was picking up the jagged shards of my favorite navy blue ceramic mug-the one I bought for $32 at a tiny coastal gallery back in 2012-when I realized the sharp edges felt exactly like the 12-month review meeting we had just endured. There is a specific kind of silence that follows the breaking of something beloved. It is the same silence that fills a boardroom when a 12-year strategic plan is presented to a room full of people who know, with absolute certainty, that they will never look at it again. I cut my thumb slightly on a piece of the handle. The blood was a bright, honest red, which was more than I could say for the ‘Vision 2032’ document currently sitting in the shared drive, gathering digital dust after 22 rounds of revisions.

He was right, which only made me want to throw another mug. We had spent the last 2 months-exactly 62 days of grueling, soul-sucking workshops-crafting a roadmap for a future that does not exist. We sat in a room that smelled of expensive roast coffee and desperation, arguing over whether the word ‘synergy’ or ‘integration’ better reflected our 2-year pivot. The reality, the ground-level truth that no one wanted to admit, was that the document was not a guide for action. It was a performative ritual. It was high-stakes theater designed to align political capital among the 22 stakeholders who all wanted to make sure their specific silos were protected in the budget for the next 12 months. We were not planning; we were marking territory.

A strategy is just a prayer written in Helvetica.

There is a strange comfort in the ritual of the offsite. We go to a resort where the air conditioning is set to a constant 62 degrees, and we pretend that we can predict the macro-economic climate of 2032. We use 12 different colors of Post-it notes to map out ‘disruptive opportunities.’ But the secret, the one that Lucas S.-J. hinted at as he finally handed me a paper towel for my thumb, is that leadership uses these plans to secure their own positions. If you can get the board to sign off on a 12-page executive summary, you have effectively bought yourself 12 months of immunity. You haven’t solved the problem; you have just categorized it into a multi-year phase-gate process that hides the lack of immediate results.

The Garden vs. The Commodity: Time and Depth

I think about the concept of legacy often, especially when I see how poorly we treat time in the corporate world. We treat the future like a commodity to be traded, rather than a garden to be tended. In the same way that a fine bottle like Weller 12 Years relies on the slow, unhurried chemistry of the cask-where the wood and the spirit negotiate a truce over decades-a true strategic direction cannot be forced into a 2-day PowerPoint marathon. You cannot manufacture the depth of a 12-year-old malt by shouting at the grain, yet we expect our organizations to develop ‘mature cultures’ through 22-slide decks and mandatory ‘visioning’ sessions. We are obsessed with the label, but we have no patience for the aging process. We want the prestige of the legacy without the discipline of the wait.

The Corporate Chronology of Abandonment

The Relationship is the Reality

Lucas finally knelt down and helped me with the last few shards. ‘The problem with your 2-year plan,’ he said, ‘is that you forgot the animals.’ I asked him what he meant, and he explained that in his work, you can have a plan to train a dog to sit in 2 minutes, but if the dog smells a squirrel, your plan is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the relationship you have built with the dog *before* the squirrel appears. The plan is a lie; the relationship is the reality. Our 52-page PDF was a plan for a world without squirrels. It assumed a vacuum where 82 competitors weren’t also trying to eat our lunch and where the global supply chain didn’t break every 22 days.

I looked at the broken pieces of my mug in the trash can. It was a beautiful object, but it was fragile. My mistake was thinking its value came from its permanence. Corporate strategy suffers from this same delusion. We think that if we make the document long enough, thick enough, and expensive enough, it becomes indestructible. We confuse the map with the territory, and then we get angry when the territory has the audacity to have a mountain where the map said there was a valley. I have seen 22 different ‘transformational’ leaders come and go, each with their own 12-point plan, and the only thing that actually changed was the level of exhaustion in the eyes of the staff. They have learned to nod at the right times, to use the 12 approved buzzwords, and then to go back to their desks and do whatever is necessary to survive the next 32 hours.

This performative planning creates a vacuum of trust. When the ‘Vision 2032’ document is inevitably ignored, the leadership doesn’t apologize. They just announce a ‘Strategic Refresh’ for 2022 (back when we were in that cycle) or whatever the next even-numbered year happens to be. It is a carousel of vanity. We spent $82,002 on a consultant who told us that our primary goal should be ‘customer-centricity,’ as if we had been intentionally trying to annoy our customers for the previous 12 years. We paid for the permission to state the obvious, wrapped in the protective plastic of a 52-page document.

That moment of tension revealed more about our internal strategy than any of the 22 slides we had produced that morning. We didn’t need a 12-year plan; we needed a 2-hour conversation about why the CFO hated the CMO.

The Terrifying Clarity of Now

I threw the last of the ceramic shards away and looked at my bandaged thumb. The pain was small, but it was real. It was a 2-out-of-10 on the pain scale, but it was more honest than anything in that 52-page strategy document. As I watched Lucas S.-J. lead a calm, 2-year-old Labrador out of the office, I wondered what would happen if we just stopped. What if we didn’t make a 12-year plan? What if we just decided what we were going to do for the next 72 hours and did it exceptionally well?

What if we admitted that we don’t know what 2032 looks like, and instead focused on making sure that the 82 people working for us felt like their work actually mattered today? It is a terrifying thought for a leadership team. Without the 52-page ghost to hide behind, they would have to be actual leaders. They would have to navigate the world as it is, not as they wish it to be on a 12-point slide deck. I think I’ll go buy a new mug. Maybe a cheaper one this time, something that doesn’t mind being broken when the next 12-month review comes around.