You’ve probably experienced this — executives gather for an annual strategy session — three days, a full agenda, plenty of presentations — and walk out with a three-to-five year rolling budget dressed up as a strategic plan. Calling it a strategy creates the false expectation that a coherent path forward has been established. In reality, the company has just done financial forecasting.
I’ve been in that room more times than I’d like to admit. Every year, the same ritual — budgets, forecasts, money rolling over from the previous year, justifications for marketing and learning and development spend. Three days of presentations covering performance metrics and future projections.
Nobody’s actually talking about the problems at hand. Why hasn’t the company grown? Why are we stagnant? What would it take to reposition ourselves in the minds of our clients? Those questions are apparently reserved for someone else — possibly the C-suite, possibly nobody — while the people closest to the clients and customers sit in the room watching slides go by.
The cost is felt at every level. People like me — not in the C-suite, somewhere between there and the senior leaders — get trapped in uncertainty. We know what needs to be addressed. But we spend our time setting up meetings to highlight problems everyone’s already aware of, seeking buy-in, and convincing people these things need to be prioritized. None of which should be necessary. All of which gets framed as conflicting priorities instead of the only priority that matters.
The teams feel it worst. They’re handed vague, conflicting goals with no clear path forward. They know the problems — they’re the ones living with them every day. They’ve raised them before. Nothing changed. So they become frustrated, cynical, helpless, voiceless, and hopeless. And each time the strategic plan gets unveiled, they already know it will fall short — because the central issues still haven’t been addressed. That’s what breeds a toxic culture of underperformance, where leadership’s commitments stop being binding promises and managers spend their time covering their tracks instead of fixing problems.
The shift that changes everything isn’t a new framework or a better template. It’s two questions: what is actually going on here — and what can we do to resolve it? Not addressing those means we’re doing success theatre for our own satisfaction. It’s only a matter of time before our failure to face the real challenges catches up with us.
Budgets and forecasting can be done asynchronously. We can gather to actually solve the challenges at hand.