The Strategy Deck That Reality Forgot: A Chasm of Trust
The fluorescent lights hummed a low, persistent whine, making the air in the conference room feel thick, almost viscous. My throat tightened involuntarily, a phantom echo of a hiccup I’d battled just a few mornings prior during an entirely different, equally performative, quarterly review. But this wasn’t quarterly; this was *the* annual strategy unveiling, and the VP, a man whose smile seemed permanently set to ‘optimistic forecast,’ was closing in on slide 94 of a deck that felt closer to 104, maybe even 124 pages long.
He clicked to the final slide, a beautiful panoramic shot of a mountain peak, captioned, ‘Ascending Towards Our Future.’ Beneath it, a tidy bullet point: ‘Realizing 4x Growth by 2024.’ My internal monologue, a cynical whisper honed over two decades of these rituals, knew the truth: this wasn’t a plan for future conquest. This was corporate theater, a meticulously staged performance designed to conjure a temporary sense of certainty, alignment, and perhaps, most crucially, a collective sigh of relief that *something* was being done. The problem? Everyone in the room knew, deep down, that the three biggest, most gnawing problems – the ones eating into our margins, fracturing our teams, and losing us customers – were conspicuously absent from the narrative. They were the elephants in the room that had quietly, politely, been asked to wait outside.
I once met a bridge inspector, Paul P.-A., a man who spent his days crawling through the
