Your Strategic Plan is a Beautiful Work of Fiction

Your Strategic Plan is a Beautiful Work of Fiction

The glossy 54-page PDF. A document of order, control, and meticulously planned future. But what if it’s not a map, but a ritual?

The email arrives with a weight you can feel through the screen. A digital thud. SUBJECT: Our 2030 Vision: The Path Forward. Attached is the glossy 54-page PDF, the result of six months, 24 steering committee meetings, and a consultant’s bill that could have funded a small startup for a year. You open it. The first page is a stock photo of impossibly happy people pointing at a whiteboard in an office flooded with sunlight that doesn’t exist in your building. The CEO’s signature is scrawled at the bottom of a foreword talking about synergy, disruption, and becoming the undisputed leader in a category he just invented.

It’s a beautiful document. The fonts are perfect. The charts are clean. It whispers of order, of control, of a future so meticulously planned that failure seems like a statistical impossibility. You scroll through, looking for your department, for your project, for a single sentence that connects this grand vision to the email you have to answer in the next 14 minutes. You find a vague bullet point: ‘Leverage Next-Generation Auditory Solutions.’

The Ghost of Plans Past

And then, nothing. Six weeks later, the market shifts. A competitor launches something unexpected. The CEO has a ‘new insight’ on a flight back from a conference. Suddenly, the entire company is in an all-hands meeting about a pivot to a new initiative codenamed ‘Project Nightingale,’ which appears nowhere in the 54-page document. The 2030 Vision PDF is now just a ghost, haunting a shared drive folder nobody ever opens.

🎭 The Performative Art of Strategy

“This isn’t a failure. It’s the plan working as intended. We tell ourselves that these documents are maps, but they’re not. They are pieces of performative art.”

Their primary function is to reassure, to give the illusion of predictability in a fundamentally chaotic system. It’s a corporate ritual.

I used to hate this. I saw it as a profound failure of leadership, a colossal waste of time and energy that bred a deep, corrosive cynicism in the people doing the actual work.

Then I helped write one.

💡 The Hidden Purpose of the Monster Plan

It was a 124-page monster for a logistics company. I spent weeks interviewing 14 different executives, trying to weave their contradictory priorities into a single, coherent narrative. I argued for 4 hours about whether our mission was to ‘streamline global commerce’ or to ’empower supply chain excellence.’ We landed on both. I was proud of the final document. It was logical, comprehensive, and utterly useless. Within 4 weeks, a massive port strike upended every assumption we had made. The plan was obsolete.

An Unexpected Benefit

“But the act of creating it had forced conversations that otherwise never would have happened. That, I realized, was part of its hidden purpose.”

⚙️ Jade H. and the Concrete Reality

Meet Jade H. She’s an acoustic engineer. Her world is not made of mission statements; it’s made of frequencies, decibels, and harmonic distortion. While the executive team was debating the 2030 Vision, she was in the lab, trying to solve a feedback problem in a new prototype that was causing a high-pitched whine at 4 kilohertz. The plan’s vague mandate to ‘Enhance user auditory experience’ doesn’t help her. It’s an abstraction layered on top of her concrete reality. Her reality is the oscilloscope, the anechoic chamber, the subtle physics of sound. She navigates not by the grand pronouncements from leadership, but by the daily tide of Slack messages, bug reports, and the urgent whisper of a project manager leaning over her desk.

Grand Strategy

☁️

Boardroom Language

VS

Execution Reality

🔧

Problem-Solving Language

This is the great disconnect. Leadership communicates in the language of grand strategy, a language designed for the boardroom. The rest of the organization communicates in the language of execution, of problems to be solved right now. The 54-page PDF is an attempt to bridge that gap, but it’s the wrong tool. It’s like trying to explain a symphony by showing someone the blueprint of the concert hall. The information is technically related, but it captures none of the essential experience.

🗺️ Here Be Dragons

It reminds me of old medieval maps. Cartographers would draw detailed coastlines of Europe and then, where their knowledge ended, they’d simply draw dragons and sea monsters. ‘Here be dragons.’ These maps weren’t failures of geography; they were honest expressions of the limits of human certainty. They were a comfort, an admission of the unknown dressed up as a definitive statement. Our strategic plans are the modern equivalent.

“The first 4 quarters are the detailed coastline. The subsequent 4 years? Here be dragons. And we’re all pretending we’ve got a detailed dragon-slaying plan.”

“A PDF is a tombstone for ideas.”

Once published, it doesn’t adapt. It can’t respond to questions. It can’t convey tone or urgency.

What if, instead of investing $84,000 on a design agency to make the PDF look pretty, leaders found a more human medium? What if the core message, the real intent behind the strategy, was delivered in a way that could actually be absorbed? Instead of a document almost nobody reads, imagine if the project leads could simply transformar texto em podcast with the crucial weekly updates, creating a 4-minute briefing people could listen to while getting coffee. Something that fits into the flow of work instead of demanding to be worshipped as a sacred text.

We keep trying to solve a communication problem with a documentation solution.

🧱 The Fortress of Text and False Alignment

“A fortress of text so dense it was impenetrable.”

That’s the mistake I made on that 124-page plan. I thought clarity came from completeness. I believed that if I just included every possible detail, every contingency, every departmental goal, then everyone would be aligned. What I created was a fortress of text so dense it was impenetrable. I gave them a manual for a machine they were still in the process of inventing. Instead of inspiring action, it created paralysis. People were afraid to do anything that might contradict the tome. They learned, as all employees do, to simply ignore it and get on with their jobs, guided by the much more reliable system of rumor and immediate managerial panic.

We say we want alignment, but we act as if alignment is a state to be achieved and then preserved, like a butterfly pinned in a display case. True alignment is a constant, messy process of conversation and correction.

“It’s less like a map and more like the constant, subtle adjustments a pilot makes to the controls during turbulence.”

The plan isn’t the destination; it’s just the initial flight path filed before takeoff. The actual journey will involve rerouting around storms nobody saw coming.

✅ The Real Impact

Jade H. eventually solved the feedback problem. It was a misplaced capacitor, a tiny component worth about four cents.

“Her fix will have a more direct and measurable impact on customer experience than the entire 2030 Vision document.”

She won’t get a mention in the next all-hands meeting. There is no line item in the strategic plan for ‘fixing the capacitor.’ There is only the hum of the machine, the data on the screen, and the quiet satisfaction of solving a real problem in the real world, miles away from the beautiful fiction being drafted in the boardroom.

A candid look at corporate strategy, real problems, and the quiet satisfaction of true impact.