You’ve probably seen this when someone walks into a room, announces a new direction, and walks back out — without ever asking what you think.
I’ve been in that room.
A new manager walked in one day at a previous organization. No introduction. No context. Just a list of instructions — from today, the technology team will not only handle support but also document everything on a new tool. Questions? Email support@XXX.com.
That was it.
We later found out that he had a degree in computer science and considered himself the expert in the room. He had one of our most experienced engineers push a cart of laptops from the ground floor to the fourth floor. A person who’d spent years diagnosing complex infrastructure problems — pushing carts.
What I felt in that moment wasn’t anger. It was invisibility.
My experience didn’t exist. My expertise didn’t exist. The problems he needed solved were exactly the problems I’d been solving for years — and none of that mattered because the plan had already been made before he walked through the door.
That’s what the master strategist myth costs at the individual level — not just efficiency, not just morale. It costs people their sense of mattering.
At the team level, it creates what I’d call an illusion of agreement — everyone nods, nobody pushes back, and the strategy gets executed badly in silence.
At the organization level, the gap between the plan and reality quietly compounds. Until the losses become impossible to ignore.
The shift that changes everything isn’t a new framework. It’s simpler than that — from chess master to gardener. Stop trying to control every move. Start paying attention to what’s actually growing.