But what does it mean to “get it into their hands?” Send them a pdf? Get them to watch a video? Attend a town hall? Attend a briefing from their manager, after she has received her briefing?

This is a massive problem and here today to apply an AI-driven solution is Amie Devero. Tune into this episode to hear from us as we tackle the issue of strategy activation together.

Show Notes

You can try Contextuum at www.contextuum.ai

Amie and Contextuum will be featured at the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026. This year’s theme is AI in Strategy Creation | Beyond Trendslop - https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com

Consider a government vehicle-inspection office. For years, getting a car certified meant a wasted morning: unexplained queues, arbitrary waits, a process nobody could explain and everybody dreaded. The clerks weren’t the problem. They were as trapped in the system as the drivers standing in line.

When the office was finally redesigned, the fix didn’t come from the counter staff working harder. It came from above — from leadership finally treating the process itself as something to be mapped, tested, and rebuilt. Decades of avoidable frustration turned out to be a leadership failure wearing a service-counter disguise.

That’s the pattern behind almost every stalled or embarrassing AI rollout today: cause and effect get separated. The department that visibly breaks is rarely the one that made the mistake. The quarter where the failure shows up is rarely the quarter where it was made. That lag is exactly why the rushed CEO and the frozen CEO can’t see they share a cause. Skip the diagnosis, and the bill arrives later — as a scrapped pilot, a quiet rollback, or a board that’s run out of patience. Each time, it looks like an isolated, unrelated event. It isn’t.

The Proof Is Piling Up

This isn’t a resource problem, and it isn’t confined to one company, sector, or country.

Starbucks spent nine months running an AI tool meant to automate beverage-inventory counts across its North American stores, before quietly retiring it after the system kept miscounting and mislabeling items, such as confusing similar milk types. Ford has been rehiring and promoting more than 350 experienced engineers after automated quality-control systems failed to capture the expertise of veteran employees. Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced dozens of customer-service staff with an AI voice bot, then had to reverse the job cuts when the system couldn’t keep up and call volumes climbed. IBM automated large parts of its HR function, discovered the tool could resolve routine requests but stumbled on anything requiring judgment, and announced plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring soon after. A widely cited MIT study found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable returns.

None of these were companies short on capital, talent, or enthusiasm. Every one of them had the AI capability. What none of them had was a diagnosis of the underlying process before the tool was chosen.

What Got Lost

That’s understandable, in a way. Most companies today are wide open to AI because their own stakeholders are demanding they keep up. A new tool appears, it gets deployed, and results get measured afterward. That works fine when the change is as simple as installing a new printer. It fails the moment the process underneath is genuinely complex — which is most of the time. What’s missing is the step where the existing process gets mapped, stress-tested for bottlenecks, and redesigned before automation is even on the table.

Both the rushed CEO and the frozen CEO would benefit from the identical corrective move — not “go faster,” not “go slower,” but insert the diagnostic step neither is in the habit of taking.

If that sounds obvious, it’s worth asking why so many organizations quietly abandoned it. Process management — mapping, testing, and redesigning core operations — was standard executive discipline in the 1990s, built on Total Quality Management, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints. Somewhere along the way, leadership teams let it lapse. The lesson hasn’t gone anywhere; it’s just been sitting unused. Years before generative AI, executives attempting Robotic Process Automation without first doing this work were warned by experts that skipping it was a recipe for failure. The warning was accurate then. It’s still accurate now, just louder.

There’s a second reason the step feels skippable: nearly every executive has personally felt AI work well. Ask ChatGPT or Claude a question on your phone, and an articulate, confident answer arrives in seconds. That experience quietly convinces leaders that AI should transform every part of the business with the same ease. But personal productivity gains and enterprise-wide transformation are not the same category of problem. Real organizational change requires the unglamorous work of scoping, staffing, and sequencing multi-year projects. There is no shortcut from a good chatbot answer to a redesigned supply chain.

One Reveal Worth Adding

In other podcast I have drawn a sharp line between planning and strategy: planning extrapolates from what you’re already doing, while strategy forces a real choice that involves tradeoffs. Most AI “strategies” are actually AI plans — lists of tools to deploy, extrapolated from what competitors are doing, with no binding constraint identified and no real choice made. A genuine AI strategy starts by asking which single process constraint, if resolved, would unlock the most value — and works backward from there. Everything else is activity dressed up as strategy.

The Actual Fix

The CEOs who rush and the CEOs who freeze are both missing the same discipline — not courage, not caution, but the willingness to slow down at the exact moment everyone else is speeding up. The rushed CEO skips the diagnosis to look decisive. The frozen CEO avoids it to look careful. Neither has done the work.

The fix isn’t a faster rollout or a longer pause. It’s a process that’s been mapped and stress-tested before a single tool gets chosen. Boards don’t ultimately reward the leader who moved first or the one who moved last. They reward the one who knew where to look before moving at all.

PS: 5 Prompts to Use With Your Favorite LLM

Copy these into Claude, ChatGPT, or your assistant of choice to apply the article to your own organization.

1. Find your lag. “Walk me through a recent failure or slowdown in my organization. Help me trace it backward — what department, decision, or process choice from 12–24 months ago might actually be the root cause, even if it doesn’t look connected on the surface?”

2. Spot your substitute behavior. “I’m about to approve/reject an AI tool for [describe the process]. Before I decide, ask me questions that test whether I’ve actually mapped this process and identified its bottleneck — or whether I’m just reacting to pressure to ‘do something.’”

3. Run a mini process diagnosis. “Here’s how [a specific process] works today, step by step: [describe it]. Identify the most likely bottleneck, and tell me what would need to be true for automating this process to actually help rather than just move the bottleneck somewhere else.”

4. Test for real strategy vs. planning. “Here’s my current AI roadmap: [paste it]. Using Roger Martin’s distinction between planning and strategy, tell me honestly whether this is a strategy — with a real choice and a clear binding constraint — or a plan that’s just a list of tools.”

5. Pressure-test your own excuse. “I’m the CEO/leader in this situation: [describe whether you’re moving fast or holding back on AI]. Play devil’s advocate and challenge me on whether my current pace is actually a disguised way of avoiding a proper process diagnosis.”

During these extreme events, you saw C-Suite executives delve into the weeds, doing the work of managers. As their time horizons shortened, they ignored the big picture until well after the crisis passed. This meant lost opportunities, and a lack of preparation for future threats.

How should you intervene given that it appears as if the roots of long-term thinking are weaker and shallower than you thought?

In this episode we look at your leadership system and where it lacks disciplined practices for long-term focus.

Something has been bothering strategy practitioners for the past two years.

Not the tools. Not the speed. Something harder to name than that.

It shows up in the quiet moment after a retreat, when someone says offhand that the AI-assisted output didn’t quite feel like us. They can’t explain it precisely enough to act on it. So they file it away. The process moves forward. The deck looks good.

If you’ve felt this, you weren’t wrong. You were sensing something real. And in March 2026, researchers at Harvard Business Review finally gave it a name.

Trendslop

The HBR researchers ran thousands of strategy simulations across seven major LLMs. They fed each model detailed scenarios — different industries, different competitive situations, different organizational challenges — and asked for strategic advice.

The answers were nearly identical across every model, every scenario.

Every LLM chose differentiation over commoditization. Augmentation over automation. Long-term thinking over short-term. Collaboration over competition. Exploration over exploitation.

Every time. Regardless of context.

When the researchers improved the prompts, the bias shifted by about 22 percent — and most of that movement came simply from changing the order in which options were presented to the model. Not from any genuine analysis of the actual business. When they added richer company context, the bias moved another 11 percent. Still pointing in the same direction.

Their conclusion was precise: an LLM can sound highly tailored to your situation while quietly steering you toward the same cluster of modern managerial trends.

That’s Trendslop. Confident. Polished. Context-agnostic. The strategic equivalent of a parrot who has read every business book ever written but has never met your team, never sat in your boardroom, and has no idea what your organization is actually capable of executing.

Trendslop is now well-named. But it’s only half the problem.

Deck-Chairing

There’s a second failure mode that nobody has written a Harvard article about yet. It’s quieter than Trendslop, more common, and in some ways more dangerous precisely because it feels like progress.

I call it Deck-Chairing.

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Deck-Chairing is what happens when you apply AI to improve a part of your strategy process that wasn’t the bottleneck. The work gets faster. The output gets cleaner. Someone in leadership notices and approves. The improvement gets reported upward.

Better slide production. Faster meeting summaries. Cleaner trend categorization. Sharper workshop notes.

All real improvements. None of them strategic.

Meanwhile the actual constraint in the strategy process — the stage where judgment breaks down, where alignment stalls, where commitment gets quietly avoided — remains completely untouched.

The name comes from the old line about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Local activity. No impact on the outcome that actually matters.

Trendslop and Deck-Chairing are mirror images of each other.

Both produce the same outcome: a strategy process that looks more capable than it is.

Daniel’s Sunday evening

Consider Daniel. Chief strategy officer at a mid-size firm. Ten years in the role. Comfortable with the tools.

Three weeks before his most important retreat of the year, he sits down on a Sunday evening and opens ChatGPT. He feeds in the company situation — competitive position, current challenges, the strategic options he’s been weighing. Then he asks the question that’s been sitting on his desk for weeks.

What should our long-term strategy be?

The answer comes back in ten seconds. Structured, confident, presentation-ready. Differentiated value proposition. Sustainability. Innovation leadership. Augment the workforce rather than replace people.

He reads it twice. It sounds smart.

Then he runs a test. Same prompt. He gives it to Claude. Then Gemini.

Slightly different phrasing. Identical conclusions.

He sits back and realizes something that has nothing to do with his prompting skills. If three frontier models built by different teams return the same five recommendations for his specific company in his specific industry facing his specific challenges, then none of them are actually analyzing his business. They’re predicting the most socially acceptable answer.

He’s not walking into the most important retreat of his career carrying advice he doesn’t trust.

But he also can’t quite articulate what he should do instead. That gap — between sensing something is wrong and knowing what the right process actually looks like — is precisely where most organizations are sitting right now.

The discipline that cuts between them

There’s a rule that came out of manufacturing improvement work decades ago. It was never written down as a law. It was more of an iron discipline the best process engineers held themselves to before touching anything.

Understand before you automate.

Not: automate and observe. Not: pilot and iterate. Understand first. Map the process. Find where it actually breaks down. Identify the constraint. Then — and only then — decide where technology belongs.

This discipline transformed factory floors. It later transformed software development. It showed up in lean manufacturing, in theory of constraints, in every serious process improvement methodology of the last fifty years.

It never made it into strategy work.

For a long time that didn’t matter, because strategy wasn’t being automated. It was slow, human, episodic. The absence of process discipline was survivable.

AI changed the cost of that absence overnight.

The principle that cuts between Trendslop and Deck-Chairing is the same one the process engineers held fifty years ago.

Never automate a strategy process you don’t understand.

Not because AI is dangerous. Because automation without understanding doesn’t improve a process. It accelerates whatever was already happening — fog and all.

What understanding actually requires

This is where the argument gets uncomfortable.

Most organizations, when they look honestly at their strategy process, find they have a deck. Five boxes on a slide. A sequence of meetings. A retreat that follows roughly the same shape it followed three years ago.

That’s not a process. That’s a ritual.

A process can be studied. It has stages with distinct purposes. It has a sociology — different kinds of thinking, different team dynamics, different vulnerabilities at each stage. It has a bottleneck — a specific point where the quality of everything downstream is determined.

For some organizations the bottleneck is the snapshot stage. The team builds its picture of current reality from memory and instinct. The diagnosis is shallow before a single strategic question has been asked.

For others it’s the scenario stage. Options get generated quickly — often with AI assistance — but they’re variations on what the organization has always considered. The range of genuine alternatives never widens.

For others still it’s the commitment stage. A direction gets chosen, it looks clear in the room, and then it dissolves quietly in the weeks after the retreat. Nobody owns it precisely enough to execute it.

Each of these is a different bottleneck. Each requires a different intervention. And none of them can be identified from the outside — not by a vendor, not by a consultant who hasn’t done the diagnostic work, not by an LLM that hasn’t met the team.

This is what the Trendslop researchers missed. They were examining the quality of AI outputs without asking what kind of process understanding would be needed to evaluate those outputs in the first place.

The answer to Trendslop is not better prompting. The answer to Deck-Chairing is not more AI literacy. The answer to both is process bottleneck engineering — understanding your strategy creation process at the level of depth where the constraint becomes visible, and where AI can be applied surgically rather than wholesale.

What comes next

That discipline — applying it, teaching it, building the practitioner tools that make it accessible — is the intellectual center of the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026.

LTSP26 runs September 15–17, fully virtual. It’s built around one question: where does your strategy process actually break down, and what does a high-leverage intervention using AI look like?

Not a toolkit. Not a trends report. A structured experience for strategy practitioners who are ready to stop asking which AI tool to use — and start asking which part of their process deserves it.

Early registration is open now. Full Ticket early discount code EARLYLTSP26 — 20% off through July 31.

strategyconf.fwconsulting.com

or

https://www.linkedin.com/events/7475287796359028737

As the person responsible for driving innovation in your organisation, you have probably sat through a version of this conversation more than once.

The leadership team agrees that a new category is needed. Everyone nods. A workshop is scheduled. Consultants are hired, sticky notes are deployed, and three months later the team resurfaces with a list of incremental improvements dressed up in the language of transformation. Nothing changes. The cycle repeats.

This is not a talent problem. It is not a budget problem. It is not even a creativity problem — though it will feel like one. It is a navigation problem. And the reason it keeps recurring is that most organisations begin every innovation effort from the same invisible assumption: that they already know what kind of thing they are trying to become. They don’t. And without that clarity, no workshop, no consultant, and no off-site retreat will produce a genuinely new category. You will keep generating better versions of what you already are.

There is a framework that changes this calculus entirely. It arrived quietly, in a new book by Joe Pine — the same strategist who gave executives The Experience Economy twenty-five years ago and reshaped the way the world thought about what companies actually sell.

What a Category Actually Is

Before you can design a new category, you need a precise definition of what a category is. In business, a category is not a filing label or a market segment. It is a space in people’s minds — the mental frame that allows a customer to understand what a product is, where it belongs in their life, and why it matters. “Smartphone,” “microwave oven,” and “streaming service” are all categories that someone invented. Each one began as an answer to a need that customers had not yet been able to name.

Category design — the deliberate act of creating a new mental frame rather than competing inside an existing one — is widely discussed and rarely achieved. Most executives who attempt it eventually conclude that it requires a creative leap they cannot engineer. That conclusion, it turns out, is wrong. What it actually requires is a ladder.

The Ladder Most Executives Have Only Seen Half Of

Pine’s original insight, from The Experience Economy, was that organisations don’t just sell things — they offer value at different levels, and those levels form a hierarchy. At the bottom are commodities: undifferentiated raw inputs where price is everything. Above that are products: manufactured goods with consistent specifications. Above that are services: activities performed on behalf of the customer. And above that are experiences: carefully staged events that engage customers emotionally and memorably.

Every hotel in the world, for example, offers a blend of products and services — a room, a meal, a concierge. A smaller number have moved up to experiences: the Marriott’s flagship properties with their signature design and curated atmosphere. Sandals, in the Caribbean, built an entire brand around the all-inclusive experience category. Each of these companies moved up Pine’s ladder deliberately, and each time they did, they left their competitors arguing about price on the rung below.

Here is what Pine’s original framework did not include — and what his new book, Transformation Economy, now adds. There is a fifth rung. Above experience sits transformation: an offering that does not merely engage or delight the customer, but permanently changes them. Not their situation. Not their environment. Them — their skills, their identity, their capabilities, their trajectory.

This rung exists in every industry. In most, it is unnamed, unclaimed, and therefore available. It is the most defensible category a company can occupy, and the hardest to copy, because transformation is not a feature. It is a relationship with a long-term outcome.

Rung Invisibility: The Hidden Reason Innovation Stalls

Most companies have never asked which rung they currently occupy. They operate without a precise definition of their own offering type, which means that when they sit down to innovate, they have no fixed starting point. Call it rung invisibility: you cannot climb toward a destination you cannot see.

This is the innovator’s dilemma in its most structural form. It is not that successful companies refuse to innovate — it is that they keep innovating on the wrong rung. They add features to products, extend services, improve experiences, and call it transformation. The ladder makes the distinction visible. Once you can see the rungs, you can locate yourself accurately, name the next rung, and build toward it with precision.

Waiting With a Destination in View

In 2007, Andrew Ng began uploading his Stanford computer science lectures to the internet. The vision was clear: university-quality education, accessible to anyone, anywhere, free. What was not yet ready was the road. Broadband penetration was uneven. Streaming infrastructure was immature. Mobile adoption had not reached the scale required. The concept of learning via video had not yet been normalised for a mass audience.

Ng spent five years building precursors, testing formats, and watching the infrastructure mature. When Coursera launched in 2012, it was not because the idea had finally arrived — it was because the enabling conditions had. MasterClass followed a similar logic: the transformation offering was clear (learn directly from the world’s best practitioners, not just their subject matter), but the model required cinematic production quality and broadband capable of delivering it at scale. Both companies launched not when they were ready, but when the world was.

This is a categorically different posture from running innovation workshops. It is not luck. It is not serendipity. It is the discipline of naming a destination — a specific rung, a specific transformation offering — and then building the long-term strategy around the conditions that will make the climb viable. Pine himself waited over twenty-five years to write Transformation Economy. As he has said, the world simply wasn’t ready before now.

Corporate Inspiration at Its Finest

As a leader, you have probably tried to inspire your organisation through personal energy — motivating speeches, bold vision statements, off-site retreats designed to generate momentum. When the results are mixed, the temptation is to conclude that you need more charisma, a better facilitator, or a more compelling narrative. You don’t. What you need is a structure that does the inspiring for you.

This is what Pine’s ladder offers when it is embedded in a corporate strategy: inspiration that lives in the architecture of the plan itself. Aspirational but credible. Fact-based. Free of hyperbole. Specific enough to span a decade without losing its force. When employees understand not just what the company does today but which rung it is climbing toward — and what conditions the organisation is watching for — they engage differently. The destination gives their work a direction that no workshop can manufacture.

Steve Jobs was explicit, in at least one public interview, that Apple’s strategy was to wait — to define the destination clearly and hold it until the technology matured enough to make the climb possible. Inside Apple, the roadmap to the iPhone and iCloud gave those who knew it something to work toward that transcended any individual product cycle. That kind of inspiration is structural, not charismatic. It is replicable. And it begins with locating yourself honestly on the ladder.

What to Do Next

Every organisation, without exception, can do this. The transformation rung exists in your industry. It is almost certainly unnamed. The fact that it is unclaimed is not a warning — it is an invitation.

The work begins with three questions. What rung does your organisation currently occupy — precisely, not aspirationally? What would a transformation offering look like in your sector: what would it permanently change about your customer? And what enabling conditions — technological, cultural, regulatory, infrastructural — are not yet mature, but are on their way?

The EndPoint Method offers one systematic approach to answering these questions within a long-term strategy process. But the starting point is available to any leadership team willing to look at the ladder honestly and ask where they are.

Innovation is not a creativity problem. It is a navigation problem. Pine’s ladder is the instrument. The fifth rung is waiting.

PS — Five Prompts to Take This Further

Use these with any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, or similar). Replace the bracketed text with your own details.

Prompt 1 — Locate your rung “I work in [industry]. Our core offering is [brief description]. Using Joe Pine’s five-rung ladder — commodities, products, services, experiences, transformations — help me identify which rung we currently occupy and what evidence supports that assessment. Be precise, not flattering.”

Prompt 2 — Define the transformation offering “In the [industry] sector, what would a genuine transformation offering look like? Define it using Pine’s standard: an offering that permanently changes the customer themselves, not merely their situation or experience. Give me three specific examples of what this could mean for a company like [company type].”

Prompt 3 — Map the enabling conditions “The transformation offering I want to build is [brief description]. What external conditions — technological, cultural, regulatory, or infrastructural — are not yet mature enough to support this at scale? Which of these are likely to mature in the next five to fifteen years, and what signals should I be watching for?”

Prompt 4 — Diagnose your innovation process “My organisation runs [describe your current innovation process — workshops, sprints, planning cycles]. Using the concept of rung invisibility — the idea that companies cannot innovate toward a destination they cannot see — identify the specific points in our process where the absence of a named transformation rung is likely to be causing us to recycle existing assumptions.”

Prompt 5 — Draft the strategic narrative “Help me write a one-page internal strategic narrative for my leadership team that: names our current rung on Pine’s ladder, defines the transformation offering we are building toward, identifies the two or three enabling conditions we are watching, and explains why this is a navigation strategy rather than a creativity exercise. Tone: direct, credible, free of consultant language.”

P.S. The LTSP26 Conference is open for registration on the conference website and on on Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/events/7475287796359028737. Part of the lineup will feature Category Cathy, an interactive AI persona with unique knowledge of work by experts like Joe Pine, author of Transformation Economy.

The CEO Who Solved Everything — and Inspired No One

You are putting in serious effort to motivate your team — and it still isn’t working. The hours are long, the intent is genuine, and the results are stubbornly flat. Before you blame your communication strategy, your budget, or your personality, consider a different diagnosis entirely.

Two fictional CEOs illustrate the problem.

Marcus is a decisive firefighter. He earned his position by tackling the problems nobody else would touch, and he has been doing the same thing ever since. Elena takes a more consultative path. She commissions engagement surveys, listens carefully to what staff say, and builds action plans from the results.

Yet both are looking at the same uncomfortable numbers: absenteeism climbing, burnout reports rising, and employees quietly asking each other, “Where exactly are we headed?” Both assume the problem is in the delivery — the messaging, the resources, the rollout. They are looking in the wrong place.

The actual diagnosis is a pattern called “Follower-Friendly Failure.”

The Same Mistake in Different Clothes

Follower-Friendly Failure is the attempt to build organisational momentum by removing friction. Fix the complaints. Address the survey results. Solve the urgent problems. The instinct is generous — leaders genuinely want to make things better for their people — but the strategy is structurally flawed.

Marcus and Elena look like opposites: urgent problem-solver versus consensus-builder. But they are making the same error in different packaging. Their failure is not in how they lead. It is in what they are leading toward — or rather, the absence of any clear answer to that question.

Elena’s approach is particularly instructive. Aggregating staff concerns produces a politically safe wish list, not a strategy. It assumes that resolving individual frustrations will compound into collective motivation. It won’t. Addressing one round of complaints simply surfaces the next round. The circle is vicious, and staff eventually exhaust themselves chasing problems that regenerate faster than they are solved.

The missing ingredient is not smarter problem-solving. It is a destination.

In this context, a destination is not a goal, a value, or a problem to be solved. It is a specific, vivid picture of where the organisation will stand at a defined point in the future — real enough that an ordinary person can orient themselves toward it.

What Political Science Reveals About Leadership

Research on voter behaviour offers an unexpected window into how destination-clarity functions as a loyalty mechanism. Studies of Donald Trump’s coalition have consistently found that roughly 25–35% of his supporters privately dislike specific policies, find aspects of his persona difficult, and disagree with particular decisions. They back him anyway.

The reason is not charisma, party loyalty, or agreement with the plan. It is agreement with the destination. These voters know where he says the country is going, and that clarity holds them even when the specific steps, or personal foibles do not.

The organisational parallel is direct. Every leadership group contains a subset of destination-first followers — people who will tolerate management friction, imperfect policies, and even a leader they find personally disagreeable, provided they can see clearly where the organisation is headed. Marcus and Elena have no mechanism for reaching this group because neither has named a destination unambiguous enough to reach them.

This is what Dr. Riel Miller, a UNESCO senior adviser, calls Futures Literacy: the capacity to use the future as a resource for acting in the present. It requires holding the future genuinely open — treating several possible destinations as real — until a single, unambiguous endpoint is chosen. Once that commitment is made, something shifts. Inspiration and discretionary effort are not manufactured through communication techniques. They are released.

This distinction matters more than most leadership development programmes acknowledge. Charisma, communication skill, and policy competence are all useful. But none of them substitute for a destination that employees can inhabit in their imagination before they inhabit it in reality

The Leading Indicator No Dashboard Captures

Executives searching for evidence that a strategy is working typically reach for lagging indicators: engagement scores, C-suite alignment, project milestones, revenue shifts. These confirm what has already happened. They do not tell you whether the organisation is actually moving.

There is a better signal, and it costs nothing to detect.

Consider an employee — call her Jody — who works in a mid-level, non-senior role. Her department has been identified as high-leverage: it sits in the 20% of organisational effort that drives 80% of strategic results, directly connected to a 15-year destination the company has committed to.

Without a clear destination, that leverage is invisible to Jody. She spends Monday doing what she did the Monday before. This is not apathy. It is a rational response to ambiguity. When no clear endpoint exists, the safest professional behaviour is to replicate what worked yesterday. Jody is not the problem. The missing destination is.

With one — a specific, unambiguous endpoint she can picture and act toward — something different happens. On Monday morning, unprompted by her manager, she spends three hours doing something she has never done before: taking deliberate actions aligned with where the organisation says it is going. Not because she was told to. Because she can see the destination and has decided to move toward it.

Notice what did not cause this shift: not a town hall, not a revised KPI framework, not a team-building exercise. The destination did the work. Her manager’s job, once the destination is clear, is largely to stay out of the way.

That behaviour — one ordinary person in a non-senior role doing something genuinely novel in alignment with the stated direction — is the leading indicator that a strategy is alive. Engagement surveys can score well while this signal is completely absent. The signal’s presence means the destination has landed. Its absence means it has not, regardless of what the dashboard reads.

When enough Jodys emerge across an organisation, the needle moves. Not because leadership pushed harder, communicated more cleverly, or solved one more urgent problem. But because ordinary people with real jobs decided, on their own initiative, that the destination was worth moving toward.

The practical implication is uncomfortable for leaders trained in comprehensive planning: resist the pressure to make the destination inclusive. A destination designed not to alienate anyone ends up directing no one. Choose one. Make it unambiguous. Then watch what Jody does on Monday morning.

Five Prompts for Deeper Reflection

Use these with any AI assistant (or as journaling prompts) to apply the ideas in this article to your own leadership context.

Prompt 1 — Diagnose your own Follower-Friendly Failure

“Here is how I currently try to motivate my team: [describe your approach]. Based on the distinction between problem-fixing and destination-setting, identify where my current approach might be producing Follower-Friendly Failure. What am I likely missing, and what would a clearer destination look like in my specific context?”

Prompt 2 — Test your destination for ambiguity

“Here is our current strategic vision or mission statement: [paste it]. Assess whether this constitutes a genuine, unambiguous destination that an ordinary employee could act toward on Monday morning — or whether it is a wish list, a values statement, or a problem-solving agenda in disguise. Then suggest what a sharper destination might say instead.”

Prompt 3 — Find your Jody

“Our organisation has articulated the following strategic direction: [describe it]. Help me identify what a ‘Jody Bloggs’ signal would look like in our context — that is, what specific, observable, novel behaviour by a non-senior employee would indicate that our destination has genuinely landed, rather than merely been communicated.”

Prompt 4 — Identify your destination-first followers

“The article describes a subset of followers who are loyal to a destination rather than to a leader’s personality or specific policies. Thinking about my own team or organisation, help me profile what this group might look like: how would I identify them, what do they need from a destination to engage, and how might I be inadvertently failing to reach them with my current communication?”

Prompt 5 — Rewrite your strategy communication through a Futures Literacy lens

“Here is how I typically communicate our strategy to staff: [paste an example — a town hall script, an all-staff email, a strategic summary]. Rewrite this using Futures Literacy principles: remove problem-solving language, eliminate wishlist elements, and replace them with a single unambiguous destination that an ordinary employee could picture and act toward. Show me the before and after side by side.”

𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘨𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘸𝘦𝘳.

Every model. Every simulation. Regardless of company size, industry, competitive position, or strategic context. The researchers gave this pattern a name: “Trendslop” dressed up as bespoke strategic insight.

If you have used AI in your strategy work and felt something was off — that the answers were too smooth, too balanced, too similar to what everyone else seemed to be hearing — you were not imagining it. You were encountering Trendslop.

The question the Harvard researchers did not answer is the one that matters most for practitioners: why does this happen, and what do you do about it?

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝘀𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜. 𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀.

Trendslop is not a failure of the tools. It is a failure of the conditions under which the tools are applied. AI plugged into a poorly understood strategy process does not improve that process. It accelerates it — fog and all — with maximum eloquence and false confidence.

The strategists who are pulling ahead in 2026 are not the ones with the longest list of AI subscriptions or the most sophisticated prompting techniques. They are doing something quieter and more disciplined: they are developing a rigorous, honest baseline of their own strategy creation process before allowing any algorithm into the room.

Process clarity is the prerequisite. Everything else follows from it.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗟𝗧𝗦𝗣𝟮𝟲 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗼

The Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026 (LTSP26) is designed around a single conviction: that the AI-in-strategy conversation is a process conversation that happens to involve tools — not a tools conversation that occasionally touches process.

Over three days, September 15 to 17, LTSP26 brings together practitioners, facilitators, consultants, and strategy leaders who are doing real work at this intersection. Not thought leaders offering frameworks. Not vendors offering platforms. Practitioners reporting from engagements.

The format is deliberately different from the standard virtual conference. Think less webinar series, more curated discovery environment — closer to an interactive museum than a lecture hall. Sessions are designed to provoke pattern recognition and shift perspective, not to deliver skill transfers or action item lists. Attendees leave with new ways of seeing, not new things to do this quarter.

Specific sessions will address:

— Why AI applied to the wrong stage of strategy creation is more dangerous than not using AI at all

— How focused AI personas — built around specific subprocess tasks — outperform general LLM prompting in strategy work by an order of magnitude

— What a rigorous strategy creation baseline looks like in practice, drawn from real engagements across multiple industries and horizons

— How tools like StratNav are being built around process clarity rather than buzzword chasing — and what that distinction means for how you evaluate any AI strategy tool

𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿

LTSP26 is for executives, strategy consultants, board advisors, facilitators, content creators, and thought leaders who are responsible for how long-term strategy gets made — and who are serious about understanding where AI genuinely improves that process and where it introduces risk.

It is not for those looking for a general AI literacy event. It is not for those who want to be told that AI will transform everything. Those events exist. This is not one of them.

If you are three weeks from a strategy retreat and your AI answers all sound identical, this conference was built for you. If your chairman has started asking questions your current process cannot answer, this conference was built for you. If you have sensed that something is wrong with the way AI is being applied to strategy work but have not yet been able to name it precisely — you have just named it.

𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱

A 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝘀𝘀 (free or pay what you wish) gives access to selected sessions and experiences across the three days.

A 𝗙𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗧𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁 ($199 USD, with purchasing power parity pricing available) gives full access to all sessions, AI persona experiences, practitioner case studies, and post-conference materials.

Early registration is open now. Use code EARLYLTSP26 for 20% off the Full Ticket through July 31.

Register at https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com

Today, your executive team fills SWOT boxes in 90 minutes and calls it strategy.

Tomorrow’s competitive landscape will punish that superficiality mercilessly. Chris Fox predicts the emerging standard: double-barreled insight generation that combines intellectual analysis with visceral pattern recognition.

The companies that master this before 2027 will spot their Kodak moments early enough to pivot. The rest will wonder why their strategy sessions produced such weak insights while competitors transformed entire business models. This conversation reveals the magnitude gap that will separate strategic survivors from casualties.

Tune in to hear from me and my special guest, Chris Fox, as we tackle and try to solve this wicked problem together. We’ll be putting our heads together to find new ways of discussing strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats – SWOT – that go beyond the usual thinking.

I’m Francis Wade and welcome to the JumpLeap Long-Term Strategy Podcast

Chris Fox is a strategy consultant and founder of StratNav, the collaborative platform for business strategy development and execution. With over 26 years’ experience, Chris helps leaders replace guesswork with evidence and execution. He also runs Chris C Fox Consulting, advising C‑suite teams on strategy that delivers

Full video available below.

Read more

The actual number was 100 million.

A decade later, AT&T paid $11.5 billion for McCaw Cellular to claw its way back into the market it had walked away from.

Hundreds of America’s brightest minds had read the same report, nodded at the same conclusion, and missed by two orders of magnitude. The forecast was polished, confident, and built entirely on data from the past. It was, in today’s vocabulary, trendslop — and it predated AI by half a century.

If you sit at the top of a company anywhere in the world, you are now being asked to make similar bets with a tool that produces trendslop on demand. A recent Harvard Business Review article, “Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got ‘Trendslop’ in Return”, called out the pattern directly. Ask a large language model for strategic advice and you get confident, polished output that sounds insightful — until you look closely and realise it could have been written by a competent intern in an afternoon.

The good news: your instincts about AI are right. It can sharpen your strategy work. It can also wreck it.

The bad news: no settled playbook yet tells you which is which.

The Iron Rule You Already Know

As a young internal consultant at AT&T, I learned a discipline that has aged better than most of the company’s 1990s forecasts: Don’t automate what you haven’t baselined.

The same idea runs through every quality programme Toyota exported to factory floors around the world. Before you mechanise a process, you map it. You measure it. You understand its variation. Only then do you bring in the machine.

The current rush to “put AI into strategy” ignores this rule. Most executive teams cannot describe how their own strategy actually gets made. Strategy creation happens once every two or three years. It rarely gets documented. Institutional memory leaks out with every senior departure. No baseline exists.

Then the LLM is invited in. And it produces — predictably — trendslop.

The problem isn’t the AI. The problem is that the iron rule was broken before the model was ever prompted.

Where AI Helps, Where It Harms

The EndPoint Method I use breaks strategy work into six stages: build a Snapshot of where you are today; pick a Target Year fifteen to thirty years out; generate Scenarios for that future; pick one scenario and translate it into numbers; Backcast milestones from that endpoint to the present; and only then build a Short-Term Strategy Map for the first two years.

Across more than sixty engagements, I have watched AI’s effect on each stage. The pattern is now clear.

AI is a net positive in exactly one stage: the Snapshot. Here, the work is synthesis — pulling together what is already known about your organisation, your market, and your competitive position. The LLM reads documents fast, finds patterns across them, and surfaces contradictions in your own data that the room had stopped seeing. It augments without replacing.

AI is destructive in two stages, and they happen to be the most consequential: Picking a Target Year, and Picking-and-Translating a Single Scenario into Numbers.

These are the moments of commitment. They demand differentiation — a stance that sets your firm apart from the average. An LLM, by design, gives you the average. It will hand you a target year that mirrors what every other company in your sector has chosen. It will quantify your scenario the way every scenario in its training data has been quantified. Use it here and you sleepwalk into the same future as your competitors.

The remaining three stages — Generating Scenarios, Backcasting, and Short-Term Strategy Mapping — are mixed. AI helps when used as a sparring partner. It harms when used as a decision-maker.

The Fix

Over the past year, my team has run strategic planning retreats with AI integrated at chosen moments and in a deliberate way — never as the source of commitment.

The pattern that works is consistent. The group defines the issue and its causes manually first — sometimes a recent trend, sometimes a decade-long problem. Only then is the LLM brought in, with a sharp prompt. For example: “Given the persona we have just described and the specific belief they hold, what three scenarios could shift their attitude?”

Within seconds, the group absorbs the conventional wisdom and moves past it. The LLM expands ideas, synthesises inputs, and surfaces blind spots the room could not see on its own. It is never asked to commit, to judge, to prioritise, or to own a tradeoff.

Decompose your strategy work. Insert AI only where it adds value. Keep human commitment, judgement, and ownership intact.

What This Quarter Looks Like

The executives who win the AI moment in strategy will not be the ones who feed their hardest questions to an LLM and hope for the best. They will be the ones who honour AT&T’s iron rule and Toyota’s philosophy of automation: baseline first, then mechanise.

So here is the work in front of you this quarter.

Do not ask the LLM where to take your company. Ask it to help you see what you already have. Build the Snapshot. Map your strategy-making process for the first time. Document the institutional memory before it walks out the door.

Only then, and only at the stages where it adds value, bring AI into the room.

Your suspicion was right on both counts. AI can improve the process. AI can also do damage. Baseline first. Then, and only then, automate.

Five Prompts to Take This Further

1. Diagnose your current practice. “Describe how strategy actually gets made in our company today — who initiates it, what inputs feed it, how decisions get committed to, and where the process is undocumented. Then identify three places where we are currently asking AI to do work we have never baselined.”

2. Audit your strategy document for trendslop. “Here is our current strategy document [paste]. Identify every statement that could plausibly appear in any company’s strategy document in our industry. Highlight the language that is generic, average, or undifferentiated — and explain why each phrase fails to set us apart.”

3. Build a working Snapshot. “Read these three documents: last year’s plan, our most recent board minutes, and our latest competitor analysis [attach]. Surface every contradiction between them, every unexamined assumption, and every gap in evidence. Do not propose solutions — only surface what is already there.”

4. Sharpen a scenario with an opposing view. “We are considering [X scenario] as the future our strategy is built around. Argue against it. Give me the five strongest reasons a sceptical board member would push back on this scenario, and the historical analogies they might cite.”

5. Pressure-test your commitment. “Here is the single scenario we have chosen and the numbers we have attached to it [paste]. Identify the three commitments we are implicitly making that the rest of the document does not acknowledge. Where would this strategy break if our chosen Target Year arrived three years later than expected?”

P.S. The impact of AI on strategy creation is forcing its way into our thinking every day. You wish you could keep up, but so much is changing so quickly that it's hard. The good news is that this is the theme of our September 15-17, 2026 strategy conference. Save the date in your calendar!

That’s the country’s productivity measured as output per hour worked — US$9. Barbados, a neighboring island economy, produces more than twice that. Panama produces five times as much. Most strikingly, Jamaica’s hourly output is only marginally ahead of Haiti’s — a country that has experienced decades of political collapse and natural disaster.

The numbers are sobering. But they are not unique to Jamaica. Across the developing world, governments face a version of the same arithmetic: their economies are generating far less per hour of human effort than they should, the gap is wide, and it has been wide for decades.

What is less often discussed is the role that government itself plays in perpetuating that gap.

The Largest Economic Actor in the Room

In many developing economies, government directly produces somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of GDP through goods and services. That makes it the single largest economic actor in the country — larger than any company, sector or industry.

But its true influence extends much further. Government shapes the entire environment in which the other 80-plus percent of economic activity takes place, through four distinct levers: macroeconomic stability, institutional quality, infrastructure and public goods, and the signals and expectations it sends to investors, businesses and citizens about the future.

That fourth lever is the most underestimated. When a government is unpredictable, inconsistent or widely distrusted, it suppresses private investment and enterprise far beyond anything that shows up in its own budget. Conversely, a government that signals credible, long-term commitment to stability and growth creates a multiplier effect on every dollar the private sector deploys.

Jamaica has made genuine, internationally recognized progress on the first lever. Its fiscal turnaround since 2013 has been studied by other nations as a model of discipline. Debt ratios have fallen. Inflation has been tamed. And yet GDP growth has not followed at the pace the data might suggest it should. The reason is that macroeconomic stability, while necessary, is not sufficient. The other three levers matter just as much — and progress on those fronts is slower and harder to sustain across electoral cycles.

Why Elections Are the Wrong Unit of Time

The deeper problem is structural. Governments, by design, operate on four- or five-year cycles. The problems that most constrain developing economies — workforce quality, institutional trust, infrastructure, behavioral norms — compound over decades. They cannot be fixed within a single term. Often they cannot be fixed within a generation.

Take literacy. Jamaica’s literacy rate trails comparable peer countries by five or more percentage points — a gap that has been building since the 1960s. That gap is a direct and stubborn drag on workforce productivity. Closing it requires sustained investment and policy consistency across twenty or thirty years, not one budget cycle.

The same logic applies to institutional quality, infrastructure and public trust. These are slow variables. They respond to patient, consistent effort — not to whoever won the last election.

This is not pessimism. It is arithmetic.

The Countries That Played the Long Game

Two examples are instructive, and they have been cited often precisely because they are so striking.

Singapore in the early 1960s had a GDP per capita comparable to Jamaica’s. It was a small, resource-poor island with a mixed population, uncertain regional relationships and no obvious competitive advantages. Today it is among the wealthiest and most productive nations on earth.

Norway had oil. So did Nigeria, Angola, and Venezuela. The difference was that Norway resisted the temptation to spend its resource windfall immediately and instead built institutional structures — including a sovereign wealth fund now worth over a trillion dollars — designed to distribute wealth across generations rather than electoral cycles.

Both Norway and Singapore have populations of around five to six million — comparable in scale to many Caribbean and Central American nations. Scale was not destiny. What separated them was institutional patience: the willingness to make commitments that no single government could unilaterally reverse.

The Design Flaw in Most Development Plans

Many developing nations have tried long-term national development planning. The typical failure mode is nearly always the same: the plan belongs to one party. When the government changes, the plan either changes with it or quietly fades from view.

Jamaica’s Vision 2030 — an ambitious plan built around the aspiration to become “the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business” — started with a bipartisan commitment, but has largely followed this pattern in recent years. It is rarely invoked by either major political party today. Its successes have not been studied. Its failures have not been honestly diagnosed.

Trinidad and Tobago offers a cautionary parallel. Multiple governments there have attempted national development plans under single-party mandates. Without cross-party commitment, each plan has been vulnerable to revision or abandonment when power changed hands. The structural challenges — growth, productivity, crime — remain largely unresolved.

The evidence from countries that have succeeded suggests a different architecture is required. Long-term national commitments need to be insulated from ordinary political interference — protected by cross-party agreement, legal frameworks and institutional norms in the same way that independent central banks or electoral commissions are protected. The goal is not to remove politics from policy. It is to place the most consequential long-horizon commitments beyond the reach of short-term political calculation.

This is not a utopian idea. It has been done — in countries that once looked very much like Jamaica does today.

The Immediate Return on Patient Thinking

There is a paradox worth naming. Patient, long-horizon thinking doesn’t only produce results over decades. It produces its first results immediately — in the minds of the leaders who adopt it.

The moment a government leader genuinely shifts from “what can I deliver before the next election?” to “what structural commitment can I make that a successor will be bound to honor?” — that shift is itself a form of progress. It changes which conversations happen, which trade-offs get made, which investments get prioritized. Institutional culture changes before the metrics do.

For any leader in the public sector who recognizes the structural arithmetic above, the question is not whether to think long. It is whether to do so quietly or loudly.

Either way, the calculus is the same. The countries that changed their trajectories did not do it in four years. They did it by making four-year decisions that pointed consistently in the same direction for forty.

Only the nations — and the institutions — willing to make and protect patient commitments have a realistic chance of closing the gaps that actually matter.

5 Prompts to Put These Ideas to Work

The arguments in this article become more useful when applied to your own institution. These prompts are designed for use with any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.). Work through them in order — each builds on the last.

Prompt 1 — Reflect “I lead [describe your ministry, agency or department] in Jamaica. The article I just read argues that government influences GDP through four levers: macroeconomic stability, institutional quality, infrastructure and public goods, and public signals and expectations. Ask me a series of questions to help me identify which of these levers my organization influences most directly — and where the biggest performance gaps are.”

Prompt 2 — Reflect “Here is my organization’s current strategic plan: [paste it]. Review it against this standard: which commitments are genuinely structural — meaning they require ten or more years to fully realize — and which are short-term fixes unlikely to outlast the current administration? Then identify what is missing from the long-term column.”

Prompt 3 — Apply “Jamaica’s literacy gap has been building since the 1960s and is described as a ‘stubborn contributor’ to low productivity. Help me identify the equivalent stubborn contributors in my sector — the slow-moving structural gaps that no single government can fix alone. What data would I need to make this diagnosis rigorously, and what would a credible 20-year improvement trajectory look like?”

Prompt 4 — Create “Using Singapore and Norway as reference points — both small nations that made long-horizon institutional commitments that outlasted individual governments — help me draft a one-page strategic hypothesis for my organization. It should answer: what is the single most important structural commitment my institution could make today that would still be bearing fruit in 2040? Start by asking me three questions about my organization’s current situation.”

Prompt 5 — Master “The article argues that Jamaica’s Vision 2030 failed partly because it lacked cross-party commitment — and that durable long-term plans must be insulated from political interference the way electoral commissions are. Help me design a cross-party commitment framework for one specific policy priority in my sector. What institutional mechanisms would make it durable enough to survive a change of government? What would have to be true politically, legally and culturally for this to hold?”

It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO, the board chair, or an ambitious director. The frustration is identical: you have strategic clarity, you know the frameworks, yet your interventions land with a thud while others command the room effortlessly. Most executives diagnose this as needing sharper frameworks or better presentation skills. Wrong problem.

This episode exposes what elite strategists do differently: they’ve built pattern libraries from accumulated case exposure that allow them to deploy diagnostic stories, pattern stories, and origin stories in the moment—not in PowerPoint decks afterward. You’ll discover why Julius Yego’s YouTube-driven Olympic medal validates cognitive science research on tacit knowledge, how Samuel Berger’s “intellectual dark matter” explains the gap between knowing frameworks and commanding strategic conversations, and why the three-season development model transforms in-the-room impact when executive programs don’t.

For global executives who’ve exhausted conventional development paths, this reveals the hidden capability that separates persuasive pattern recognition from forgettable framework recitation—and the deliberate practice method that builds it.

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Enjoy the full video of this episode below for all subscribers.

Most top executives can generate urgency around a quarterly target. The mechanisms are familiar: dashboards, deadlines, compensation levers. People move.

But ask those same executives to build genuine momentum toward a grand aspiration which needs a fifteen-year horizon, and something strange happens. They show up. They nod. They wait for the pressure to pass.

This isn’t insubordination. It’s a rational response to a broken process. And if you’ve ever led a strategic planning cycle that produced a polished document nobody touched again, you already know the symptom. The question is whether you’ve correctly diagnosed the cause.

The Real Problem Is Sequence, Not Ambition

CEOs who struggle to activate major aspirations or breakthrough results typically frame it as a people problem — their teams aren’t bold enough, disciplined enough, or strategically literate enough. Frequently, they apply pressure to fix the problem and become too directive. They hope their personal energy fills the void.

Perhaps just as often, they do the opposite and become too passive. In this mode they back off, hoping organic energy fills the void. It rarely does.

Neither framing is quite right. In the end, CEO’s migrate towards short-term goals because they don’t have a reliable way to maintain both short-, mid-, and long-term momentum.

The deeper issue is that most organizations try to do too much in a single planning meeting.

Effective accomplishment of all three phases at the same time requires two distinct meetings, held weeks apart, each demanding a different posture from the leader. Getting the sequence right changes what the plan is, who owns it, and how fast it can move.

Clarifying Misconceptions About Long Horizons

Before the two meetings make sense, two widespread beliefs need to be addressed:

the first is that long-range planning is inherently vague, and therefore not worth taking seriously.

Mistake 1) This is a problem for CEOs who truly have big aspirations, because long-range planning calls for the decades needed to make breakthrough goals realistic and credible to stakeholders. Without adequate time, executives play the game mentioned before. They show up, nod, and wait for the pressure to disappear.

This view of long-range planning being vague is understandable but technically wrong.

The planning tools appropriate for year one of a strategy are genuinely different from those suited to year twenty-five — but that doesn’t mean the far end of the horizon is a guess. It just needs to be equipped in the right way.

For example, the Rolling Wave Technique leads to the use of different methods, mindsets and discussions for short- and long-term phases. It provides operational details in the short term, and higher-altitude targets and milestones in the long term.

Neither end is more rigorous than the other. They are rigorous in different ways. The confusion exists because precious few use the technique. It’s just not taught in most business schools as a component of corporate strategy.

Mistake 2) The second faulty belief is that long-term aspirations don’t matter. To explain why this is so wrong, consider a historical example.

Medieval cathedral builders routinely committed to projects spanning two to three centuries. No individual craftsman who broke ground would see the finished nave. Yet construction continued across generations, through plagues and political upheaval, because the aspiration was large enough to give the work meaning — and specific enough to give it credible direction. Floor plans existed. Proportions were specified. Progress was measurable even when the endpoint was a lifetime away.

This points to a counterintuitive truth: the grander the ambition, the more likely it is to unlock discretionary effort — the creativity and energy people typically reserve for pursuits they actually care about.

Modest, short-term goals produce compliance. In corporate life, these tend to be overwhelmingly financial.

Transformative goals, properly constructed, produce ownership. The audacity of a well-chosen endpoint is itself a management tool, one that most corporations never pick up.

With these misconceptions cleared up, here are the details of both meetings and how they are conducted.

Meeting One: The CEO Goes Quiet

The first meeting has one non-negotiable design principle: the CEO sponsors but does not lead. Or facilitate.

This is harder than it sounds. Most executives who have reached the top of an organization have done so partly through the force of their vision. They arrive at planning sessions having already formed views about where the company should go. The instinct is to share those views early — to inspire the team with a compelling picture of the future and let the session fill in the details.

Resist it. Completely.

The goals of this first meeting are for the executive team to construct the long-range aspiration themselves and define the means to accomplish it. That means choosing a target year — somewhere between fifteen and thirty years out — and then building the assumptions, scenarios, and numbers required to define what success looks like at that point.

It’s followed by the use of the Rolling Wave Technique to lay out a plan for the entire horizon, with more details in closer than later years.

Facilitators can guide the process. The CEO’s role is to hold the space while that process unfolds, tolerating the discomfort of an outcome they did not pre-select and cannot entirely predict.

What makes this worthwhile is what it produces: genuine co-ownership. Every figure the team debated, they will later defend. Every scenario they stress-tested, they trust because they built it. A strategic target and plan defined by the CEO and handed to the team is a document. A strategy the team constructed is a commitment — and the difference shows up in execution, not in the planning room.

For example, one team member assumes a technology shift in five years. Another assumes fifteen. Both assumptions are driving their instincts about investment and timing, silently, in every meeting they attend. Naming those beliefs, debating them, and converting them into dated claims is one of the most underrated outputs of a well-run long-range planning session. It also reveals where the team’s consensus is genuine and where it is merely polite.

Meeting Two: The CEO Becomes an Instigator

Several weeks after the first meeting — long enough for the plan to feel real, not so long that momentum fades — the CEO calls a second session. It has a single agenda item, framed as a question:

“Using the same logic we built together, how much faster could we realistically get there?”

The phrasing matters more than it might appear. This is not a demand for “twice the output in half the time” — the kind of arbitrary stretch target that produces creative accounting and quiet cynicism. It is an invitation to apply the team’s own reasoning to a compression problem. They set the destination and the pathway. Now they are being asked whether the chosen route is as efficient as it could be.

And because the team built the original logic, they are the only people positioned to answer the question credibly. They know which assumptions were conservative. They know where interdependencies between units create natural leverage — and where they create drag. They know which technologies on the industry’s horizon could compress a transition the plan assumed would take a decade. They know where the plan padded timelines because of organizational inertia rather than genuine constraint.

That collective intelligence almost never gets activated, because the question that unlocks it is almost never asked. Unfortunately, leaders tend to apply pressure before the team has built the logic, which means compression becomes a negotiation rather than an analysis. The two-meeting sequence reverses that order — and the difference in what the team produces is striking.

The best version of this second meeting doesn’t only produce a revised plan. It produces a set of credible acceleration options: specific conditions under which the timeline compresses, specific investments or decisions that could trigger those conditions, and an honest accounting of what would have to be true for the faster scenario to hold. The team leaves not just aligned, but strategically fluent in a way that one-off retreats almost never achieve.

Case in point: Before 2017, one of my clients in the Jamaican financial sector had never put a date to an assumption: “the average local customer is not ready for online services.”

When I challenged them to place a date on the moment when 50% of the population would reach that threshold, they predicted: 2028. They wove that date into their plan.

Three years later when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, that plan was simply accelerated (i.e. compressed) to be implemented within months rather than a decade. They were lucky.

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The Resilience Dividend

There is a benefit to this process that rarely appears in planning frameworks: the organization becomes significantly harder to surprise.

An executive team that has jointly built a long-range plan, surfaced its embedded assumptions, dated them, stress-tested scenarios, and explored acceleration options has essentially pre-thought a wide range of futures.

When the external environment forces their hand — a market disruption, a technology shift, a crisis that compresses years into months — they are not improvising. They are activating a version of something they already worked through. The decisions feel fast because they had already built the internal logic needed to respond.

This is not a theoretical benefit. Organizations routinely discover, under pressure, that their plans contained a faster path they simply hadn’t chosen to pursue yet. The companies best positioned to accelerate in a crisis are the ones that already knew, in principle, how acceleration was possible — because they had asked themselves exactly that question before one was forced on them.

The slow work of building shared logic, it turns out, is what makes rapid response possible. Resilience isn’t built in the crisis. It’s built in the room, in the meeting before the meeting, when the CEO is quiet enough to let the team think.

Why This Rarely Happens — and What to Do About It

The reason most aspirations which require long-term strategies end up stalling is that the people accountable for executing them never felt genuinely accountable for creating them. The CEO’s vision, however compelling, remains the CEO’s vision. Rollout becomes performance. Compliance replaces conviction. And when conditions change, there is no one in the room who feels responsible for updating the logic — because the logic was never theirs.

The two-meeting structure addresses this not through a motivational technique but through a structural one. Ownership is built in at the design stage. The compression question in the second meeting then activates that ownership, rather than challenging it.

The process asks something genuinely difficult of the CEO: to be quiet and patient at the moment when they most want to speak, and to ask a question — rather than issue an instruction — at the moment when they most want to apply pressure. Both moves feel counterintuitive. Both, consistently, work.

Begin with the meeting where you say less than you ever have before. What comes next will surprise you.

Use These LLM Prompts to Apply This Framework

Copy any of the following into an AI assistant to put the ideas in this article to work for your organization.

1. Pressure-test your current strategy “Here is our current strategic plan: [paste or summarize]. Using the Rolling Wave principle from the article I just read, identify where our plan conflates short-, mid-, and long-term planning into a single approach. What assumptions are we treating as facts? Which ones should have a specific date attached to them?”

2. Prepare for Meeting One “I am a CEO preparing to run a long-range planning session where my role is to facilitate, not lead. Our industry is [X]. Help me design a 3-hour agenda that guides my executive team to construct a 20-year aspiration themselves, without me imposing a conclusion. Include the questions I should ask — and the ones I should resist asking.”

3. Surface your team’s hidden assumptions “Here are the key assumptions embedded in our strategy: [list them]. For each one, challenge me to convert it from an open-ended belief into a dated, falsifiable claim. Then identify which assumptions, if wrong, would most significantly change our direction or timeline.”

4. Run the compression question “Here is a summary of our long-range plan: [paste summary]. Assume the logic is sound. Now help me identify: which parts of this plan are paced by genuine external constraints, and which are paced by internal inertia or conservative thinking? Where could the timeline realistically compress — and what would have to be true for that to happen?”

5. Build your resilience map “Based on the strategic plan below [paste], identify the three to five external disruptions — technology shifts, market changes, regulatory moves — most likely to force an acceleration of our timeline. For each, describe what an already-prepared organization would do in the first 90 days, versus one that had never considered the scenario.”

The original version of this article was published in the Jamaica Gleaner.

There is a book on the shelf of almost every serious executive in the world. It has sold over four million copies, been translated into 46 languages, and spawned an entire consulting industry. Its central idea is so compelling that once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.

The book is Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS), published in 2004 by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The central idea: stop fighting competitors for the same shrinking pool of customers. Create new market space where competition is irrelevant. Stop swimming in a Red Ocean of blood and churn. Find your Blue Ocean.

Every executive who has heard this wants it. The aspiration is sound. The problem is that the book quietly fails to deliver what its title promises - and that failure has cost organizations time in over two decades of strategy retreats.

The Word That Did the Damage

The most consequential editorial decision in modern management publishing happened when the authors agreed to put the word “Strategy” in the title.

That single word changed how executives read the book. Strategy implies a plan. A method. A set of steps you can follow to get from where you are to where you want to be. Executives arrived at the book expecting operational guidance. What they received instead was one of the most elegant collections of business case studies ever assembled — and no instructions for replication.

Consider the cases. Cirque du Soleil, the book’s showcase story, reinvented the circus by eliminating animals and creating a sophisticated adult entertainment category. Yellow Tail wine made wine approachable for beer drinkers by stripping out complexity and jargon. NVIDIA opened its graphics processors to general computing and created an entirely new category of accelerated processing. Taylor Swift reinvented the artist’s relationship to fans, catalog ownership, and brand extension.

Each case is vivid. Each pattern is compelling. But each story was crafted long after the journey was complete.

That is the problem. Every case in the book is retrospective. The authors identified companies that had already succeeded, mapped their moves, and presented the pattern. What they did not — and perhaps could not — provide is a repeatable method for how your company executes a similar move from scratch, in your industry, with your constraints, before the outcome is known.

This is not a minor gap. It is the structural flaw that separates the book’s promise from its delivery. And it helps explain why boardrooms around the world have produced beautiful strategy canvases (as the book instructs) and returned to fighting the same competitive battles the following Monday morning.

The Tool That Starts in the Wrong Place

There is a deeper problem, and it lives inside the book’s primary diagnostic instrument — the Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create grid, known as the ERRC.

To use the ERRC grid, you map what your industry currently does across every competitive factor, then decide what to eliminate, reduce, raise, and create. Every factor you analyze is defined in relation to what competitors already do. The entire diagnostic starts with your rivals.

Here is the irony: a framework designed to help you escape competition requires you to think about competition first. If your strategic imagination is anchored to what already exists, you have not left the Red Ocean. You have only rearranged your position within it. The book’s primary tool quietly undermines its central promise.

The Pattern the Book Ignores

Set aside the tool problem for a moment. Assume your team finds its Blue Ocean. You create uncontested market space, grow rapidly, and establish genuine differentiation. What happens next?

Blue Ocean Strategy is largely silent on this question. And the answer, drawn from its own case studies, is uncomfortable.

Cirque du Soleil created its blue ocean in the 1980s and spent nearly four decades defending it. New competitors entered experiential entertainment. Costs rose. The company took on debt to fund global expansion. In June 2020, it filed for bankruptcy protection.

Netflix invented streaming video and watched Disney, Amazon, Apple, and dozens of others flood the same space within a decade. Uber redefined urban transportation and has spent most of its existence losing money as imitators replicated its model in every major market.

These are not execution failures. They are the inevitable result of treating a blue ocean as a destination rather than a phase.

Every competitive advantage has an expiry date. The timeline varies — years, sometimes decades — but the sequence never changes. You create uncontested space. Competitors notice. Imitators arrive. Margins compress. The blue ocean turns red. This is not misfortune. It is the entirely predictable lifecycle of any strategic advantage, and it has been predictable for a long time.

That is the core of what Blue Ocean Strategy leaves out: a theory of time.

The book is written as though the strategic challenge is finding the right space. It is not. The deeper challenge is understanding that every space you find is already aging from the moment you enter it — and that long-term survival depends on building the next blue ocean while the current one is still profitable enough to fund it.

A framework called the Three Horizons Framework, developed by Hodgson, Curry and others, addresses precisely this gap. It argues that organizations must simultaneously protect today’s advantage, develop tomorrow’s opportunity, and explore the possibilities that will matter in five to ten years. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. Because by the time your current advantage is visibly declining, it is already too late to begin building its replacement.

Blue Ocean Strategy asks: where should we compete? The Three Horizons Framework asks: for how long, and what comes next? The first question without the second is not a strategy. It is a plan with no second act — which is exactly what Cirque du Soleil, Netflix, and Uber each discovered in turn.

The Company That Proved Both Points

Wawa is a food retailer based in the northeastern United States. It operates convenience stores, fuel stations, and quick-service restaurants — three of the lowest-margin, highest-failure-rate business categories in existence. It is also, by most available measures, one of the most successful blue ocean practitioners in American business history.

In 2009, facing a world where supermarkets, fast casual chains, and fuel retailers were all converging on its territory, Wawa’s leadership formally applied the Blue Ocean tools. The strategy canvas and ERRC grid structured their analysis and were genuinely useful. They identified that their weakest offering — food service — was also their highest-potential opportunity for differentiation.

What followed was systematic reinvention. Wawa repositioned from a convenience store that also sold food into a quality quick-service restaurant that also sold fuel and convenience items. Fresh bread baked on premises. Customizable meals made to order. High-quality coffee at accessible prices. Touchscreen ordering kiosks. A store layout redesigned with food at the center.

The results are measurable. An average 7-Eleven generates roughly US$30,000 to $35,000 in weekly revenue per store. Wawa averages US$116,000. That gap — more than three times the category standard — is what genuine blue ocean execution produces in real dollars.

Perhaps more telling is what the broader industry makes of Wawa’s performance. QSR 50, the standard industry ranking of quick-service restaurants, does not include Wawa in its listings. The reason given is that Wawa sells fuel and packaged goods, which technically classifies it as a convenience store rather than a restaurant. If Wawa were included, it would rank first in per-store sales — ahead of McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and Panera Bread. The most effective blue ocean practitioner in American retail is invisible to the industry supposed to be tracking it. That is what genuine category creation actually looks like.

But here is the detail that the book’s framework cannot account for, delivered in the words of Wawa’s own former CEO Howard Stoeckel: “We’re paranoid when it comes to success and we’re always reinventing ourselves.”

Not proud. Not secure. Paranoid.

Wawa has reinvented itself across more than two centuries — from dairy farming to grocery retail to convenience stores to fuel to quick-service restaurants. Each reinvention happened before the previous model was exhausted. In 2012, Stoeckel announced that Wawa was no longer a convenience store. It was, he declared, “a leading quick-service restaurant and leader in the fast-casual-to-go space that also sells gas and convenience items.” No such category existed at scale at the time. Competitors scoffed. Customers gradually came to see it exactly that way.

That move — naming a new space and teaching the market to recognize it before rivals could claim it — is not in the Blue Ocean book. It belongs to a separate body of thinking about category design, developed by writers including Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole. Their argument is direct: whoever names the new category can dominate it for decades to come. Language is key. The market does not automatically recognize new value — someone has to hand it the vocabulary.

What Executives Should Actually Do

Blue Ocean Strategy offers the right aspiration. The ambition to escape a competitive space rather than simply fight better within it is correct, and the book makes that case more compellingly than almost anything else in the management canon.

But aspiration without method produces what most organizations have experienced: a retreat, a strategy canvas, a renewed sense of possibility, and no change the following quarter.

The complete system looks something like this. Use BOS to identify where genuine value innovation is possible — where you can create new demand rather than compete for existing demand. Apply a long-horizon lens from the moment you make your move, treating your new blue ocean as inherently temporary and building the next opportunity while the current one is still strong. Invest as much in naming and framing your new category as you do in designing it — because a blue ocean no one can describe is a blue ocean no one will defend.

The book is not wrong. It is incomplete. Read it for the vision it provides so clearly. Then build the method around it that it never supplies.

PS — Going Deeper: Five Prompts for Your AI Assistant

The arguments in this article can be taken further using any AI tool. Here are five prompts to continue the thinking:

1. “Map my company’s current strategy against the Three Horizons Framework by Hodgson and Curry. Ask me questions about our current business, emerging threats, and what’s already replacing us in the market.”

2. “Using Blue Ocean Strategy’s ERRC grid as a starting point, help me identify where my industry’s assumptions are so deeply embedded that we have stopped questioning them.”

3. “Give me five examples of companies that created a genuine blue ocean, then failed to build the next one before their advantage decayed. What was the warning signal they missed in each case?”

4. “Help me write a category definition statement for my business — not what we do, but what new space we are creating and why we should own it.”

5. “Based on Wawa’s reinvention story, design a set of questions I can bring to my next strategy retreat to test whether we are building our next blue ocean or simply defending the current one.”

Mine arrived fifty minutes into a live podcast recording with Seth Godin.

I was mid-interview. The mic was hot. And somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth story, I heard myself say — out loud, on the record — “I don’t know how that magic works, because I don’t have anywhere near as many stories.”

Not to a colleague afterward. Not in a private debrief. To Seth. Live. While we were still recording.

That sentence has followed me since.

What I Watched Happen in One Hour

In sixty minutes, Seth Godin moved through fourteen distinct stories. Not anecdotes he was winging. Not tangents. Fourteen purposeful, precisely deployed narratives — each one doing specific work, each one landing cleanly and then stepping aside.

A hospital crib factory in Buffalo. A Walmart auditorium in Arkansas. A Google homepage with two links. A grease-covered piece of equipment that nobody had touched in a decade.

Every single one hit. Every single one served a function.

And I sat there with my small, carefully curated collection of retreat-tested stories — organised around a single argument about time horizons — and realised I had been confusing a handful of tools with an actual toolkit.

That’s not a library. That’s a filing cabinet with three folders.

The Research I Did After

The interview shook me enough to investigate. What exactly was Seth doing, and how consistently was he doing it?

With AI assistance, I pulled and analysed twelve recent Seth Godin interviews. Across all of them, he averaged 11.08 stories per conversation — 133 stories in total. His most recent book, This is Strategy, contains 87 stories.

So I asked him directly: “Is your list of stories infinite?”

His answer was more useful than I expected. “No,” he said. “And the best consultants carry around twenty stories.”

Twenty. Not two hundred. Not a bottomless archive. Twenty stories — known intimately, deployable on demand, calibrated for different rooms and different audiences. He compared it to master magicians: the great ones haven’t perfected a hundred tricks. They’ve mastered around a dozen, and they know exactly when to use each one.

Twenty stories. That’s the target. And most of us — including me, before that interview — couldn’t name five that we genuinely owned.

What Gladwell Does That Most Strategists Don’t

Malcolm Gladwell — bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and Blink — operates on a similar principle, and his method is almost shamelessly transparent once you see it.

He never opens with a thesis. Never. There is always a human scene first. A hockey player’s birth month. A recipe for ketchup. A single moment of lived experience that drops you into a specific world before you’ve had time to raise your defenses.

Only once your attention is captured does he pull back to reveal the larger pattern.

And then — this is the part most people miss — he withholds the ending deliberately. He tells ninety percent of the story, pauses to layer in research, context, and argument, and only then closes the loop. By the time he delivers the conclusion, you’ve been waiting for it. You feel the release.

None of that is improvised. It is a deliberate system, engineered to do one specific thing: name what the audience already senses, but cannot articulate.

Seth described this in our conversation with a fundraising example. A skilled fundraiser, he said, doesn’t open with statistics about hunger. They open with a question: “What was it like at your dinner table growing up?” The data comes later. The story opens the door.

Both men are doing the same thing: uncovering the story that gives language to something the audience already intuitively knows. Seth calls this “profound” — not the delivery of new information, but the gift of precision to an existing intuition.

That is a fundamentally different job than most executives think storytelling does.

The Real Problem With How Strategists Use Stories

Most executives use stories as decoration. They drop one in to break up a dense presentation, to humanise a slide, to get a laugh after a difficult section.

That’s not what Godin and Gladwell are doing. Their stories aren’t decoration. They’re load-bearing. Remove them and the entire argument collapses.

The distinction matters enormously in strategy work. When you’re trying to shift how an organisation thinks about time, risk, or change — data alone does not move people. People need a narrative frame before they can absorb an argument. Stories aren’t the soft packaging around the hard thinking. They are the thinking, made transmissible.

Which means the question isn’t whether you have stories. Everyone has stories. The question is whether you have the right ones — ones that will actually land with your specific audience, in your specific context, under pressure.

Right now, most senior professionals cannot answer that question with any confidence.

Building the Library

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the gap Seth exposed cannot be closed by reading more books, attending more conferences, or taking another course.

It requires a different kind of discipline — one that is specific, deliberate, and ongoing.

Start with genuine curiosity. Not with what you think you should know, but with what actually pulls your attention. The stories that stick with you across months and years are telling you something about what you uniquely see that others miss. That’s the foundation.

Then do the work: find stories worth keeping, stress-test whether they will land with your audiences, organise them so they are retrievable under pressure — not just vaguely remembered — and practise the telling until it no longer feels like performance.

The raw material is everywhere. Platforms built for deliberate curation of strategic content exist precisely for this purpose. Decades of interviews, documentaries, case studies, and executive conversations are available to anyone willing to approach them with intention rather than passive consumption.

The constraint isn’t access. The constraint is discipline.

Seth’s number is twenty. Yours might be fewer. But you need to know which stories they are — you need to own them, not just have encountered them — and most of us, if we’re honest, are nowhere close.

The Sentence That Changed My Practice

I didn’t plan to be candid on that podcast. The confession about my own story gap wasn’t scripted vulnerability. It was the involuntary, real-time recognition of a professional blind spot I had been carrying for years without knowing it.

That’s how these things tend to arrive. Not in a structured self-assessment. Not in a performance review. In the middle of a live conversation with someone who has simply done the work you haven’t.

The question isn’t whether you’re a good strategist. You may well be exceptional at frameworks, diagnosis, and execution planning.

The question is whether your stories can do what Seth Godin’s stories do — open a door, name what your audience already senses, and make your argument not just understandable but felt.

If you’re not sure, that uncertainty is your answer.

Start building the library.

P.S. — The Curation Problem Has a Starting Point

If the article resonated, part of your next step is finding the right raw material — stories worth adding to your library, told by people who actually know how to tell them.

That’s exactly what StratCinema was built for. It’s a curated video platform for strategy professionals — not an algorithm feeding you whatever keeps you scrolling, but a deliberately assembled collection of interviews, case studies, and executive conversations selected because they carry genuine strategic weight.

Think of it as the opposite of YouTube’s recommendation engine.

If you’re serious about building your story library with intention, it’s a useful place to start: StratCinema.org

P.P.S. — Five Prompts to Go Deeper (Use These With Any LLM)

The ideas in this article are a door. These prompts help you walk through it.

1. Audit Your Current Story Library “I’m a [role] working with [type of clients/organisations]. I want to identify the strategic stories I currently rely on. Help me audit them by asking me questions one at a time — what the story is, what argument it supports, and whether it would land with different audience types.”

2. Reverse-Engineer a Master Storyteller “Analyse how Seth Godin uses stories in his writing and speaking. What structural patterns does he use consistently? Give me five specific techniques I can practise, with an example of each.”

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3. Find Stories Hidden in Your Own Experience “I’m going to describe three professional situations I’ve been in. For each one, help me identify whether there’s a story worth keeping — one that names something an audience already senses but can’t articulate. Ask me to describe the first situation.”

4. Build a Story for a Specific Strategic Argument “I need to make the argument that [insert your strategic point] to an audience of [insert audience]. Don’t give me data or frameworks. Help me find or construct a story that opens a door to this idea — something human and specific that lands before I introduce the argument.”

5. Design Your Personal Twenty-Story Repertoire “Seth Godin says the best consultants carry around twenty stories. Help me design mine. Based on my work in [field/industry], what categories of stories should I have in my library? Give me a framework for organising them by purpose — not by topic — so I can retrieve the right one under pressure.”

These work best when you treat the LLM as a thinking partner rather than a search engine. Push back on its answers. Ask it to go deeper. The prompts are a start — the conversation is the work.

An awkward silence falls over boardrooms when directors flip through a newly printed plan and instantly recognise it. To their frustration, almost nothing has changed since the last one done five years before. Despite clearly stated expectations, little has shifted. So what’s missing?

The reason the strategic logic remained unchanged (and your company didn’t move up the Businessuite Top 100 list) is usually blamed on the executive team. Not enough creativity. Not willing to challenge assumptions. Not able to rigorously examine calcified, stale doctrines.

Unfortunately, rotating C-Suiters doesn’t work. Neither does a demand for bolder thinking. Or outside experts who merely recycle known frameworks.

But before you intervene, consider the actual inputs which feed into the process. Your senior team reads the same Harvard Business Review articles as others in the region. They listen to the same lecturers explain the same frameworks. They follow the same big players.

And when they reach for inspiration, they draw from the same narrow pool as always. This is why regardless if you replace the entire C-Suite tomorrow, the next plan will look the same.

The condition is called “input homogeneity.” Same inputs = same outputs. Here is a way to intervene in even the most stubborn situations.

The Ghost Conversation

There is an element of the overall discussion which takes place in every company…but not in the formal process. Where does it happen? In the car park, over drinks, or in the hallway between sessions. The topic? A threat only addressed in quiet tones.

It never makes it onto a slide deck, but it keeps senior executives up at night due to its power and danger. The single-revenue dependency. The demographic shift. The regulatory change. The new technology tearing up the industry in Asia.

You know which conversation this is at your company. (And even if you belong to the public sector, you are well aware of defunded organisations which lost their way, only to be folded meekly into others.)

The reason these discussions remain informal is not cowardice.

Instead, the common three-to-five-year planning horizon is just short enough to filter out these questions. Why? Inside the usual retreat, everyone unconsciously assumes the current business model will survive… ”it only needs a few tweaks.” The industry structure is also accepted: it won’t change either.

Nobody has to challenge these assumptions because the truncated window makes them seem reasonable. Plus, your incentives reward confident planners, not the ones that point out uncomfortable vulnerabilities.

Consequently, the most strategically valuable conversation in the company remains permanently and repeatedly excluded from the corporate strategy.

Three Inputs That Change Everything

If the problem is structural, so is the fix. Forgo reshuffling the C-Suite, and craft three fresh inputs instead.

Stretch the horizon. In your next session, ask the team to select a new time frame between 15-30-years. Not to forecast, because no-one can predict that far. Consider this a stress test of your company’s “winning” formula, if it follows the current path.

The gap between the projected faraway future and your likely, default trajectory shows the reality you must confront. You will find that a longer window does not necessarily produce better predictions. But it will produce better (but uncomfortable) questions, the kind a five-year horizon conveniently avoids - but shouldn’t.

Contaminate the reference base. Stop benchmarking only your direct competitors. Introduce strategic patterns from industries and geographies your team has never studied. When a Caribbean financial services firm studies how a logistics company in Southeast Asia restructured its value chain, the specific details are irrelevant. But the unfamiliar pattern breaks the grooves worn by years of studying the usual suspects. (Recommendation: use my compilation of cases at StratCinema.org to be efficient.)

Formalise the ghost conversation. Create a structured session — early in the process, not as an afterthought — where you explicitly ask the team to name the slow-burning threats everyone discusses privately.

This is not just brainstorming.

It is a permission structure. Most executives will not raise existential concerns unless the architecture of the session boldly invites them to.

Picture the boardroom again. The directors open the new plan. They begin reading. And for the first time in a decade, no one recognises it. Not because it is reckless, but because it addresses questions, the previous plans were incapable of asking.

It names what everyone knew but nobody had been permitted to say aloud. The team sitting around the table is the same one that produced the last plan. But the talent didn’t change. The inputs did.

The CEO who engineers that moment won’t need to explain what strategic leadership looks like. The room will already know.

Picture a familiar scene in a non-profit organization. A hotel conference room. Flip charts on easels. A two-day offsite that everyone has blocked out on their calendar and quietly dreaded.

The exercises begin. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Stakeholder maps. Priority matrices. The team engages dutifully, filling in the boxes, generating the language that planning retreats are supposed to generate.

Then comes the afternoon slump - and it is not just fatigue from the morning’s work. Something more specific has happened. The conversation has drifted away from the reason the organisation exists. Words like “competitive positioning” and “market capture” are appearing on the sticky notes, and they feel borrowed - like wearing a suit that belongs to someone else.

Nobody says anything. Everyone is willing the process to work.

A document emerges by the final session. The board receives it at the next meeting. And within a few months, it occupies a shelf or a folder, largely untouched.

This is not a story about poor facilitation or disengaged leadership. It is a story about using the wrong instrument for the job.

Where These Frameworks Actually Come From

Management strategy as a discipline has a particular genealogy. The models that dominate executive education - the competitive analyses, the positioning matrices, the market share battles - were developed with a specific type of organisation in mind: businesses that survive or collapse based on their ability to outperform rivals and make profits.

The evidence is in the curriculum. Academic research suggests that the vast majority of MBA case material is drawn from industries where competition is the central organising tension. The mental model underneath most strategy training treats the world as a contest. There is a prize. There are opponents. The goal is to win more than you lose.

That framing is genuinely useful for firms operating in those conditions. The urgency of a competitor threatening your revenue is real, and tools designed around that urgency have genuine motivating power.

But take those same tools into a cooperative, a trade association, a government agency, or a development organisation, and something goes wrong almost immediately. (The same applies to a monopoly.) The animating force - the rival who might take what is yours - does not exist in the same way. Frameworks engineered around that force become awkward, like running software on a system it was never designed for.

The afternoon energy drop at your retreat was not a morale problem. It was the sound of a square peg meeting a round hole.

The Timeframe Problem Nobody Talks About

The mismatch runs deeper than vocabulary, though.

Competitive strategy is built around a particular relationship with time - specifically, a short one. The frameworks that dominate business education are oriented toward near-term results: quarterly performance, annual targets, the speed of response to a market threat.

Mission-driven organisations often operate under an entirely different time logic. A land trust working to preserve ecosystems, a credit union serving underbanked communities, a health institution building public capacity - these organisations are answerable to timescales that most competitive strategy tools cannot even see.

When a long-horizon organisation runs its strategy through a short-horizon framework, something gets quietly distorted. The institution begins optimising for the measurable and the near-term, while the foundational commitments - the ones that justify the organisation’s existence - drift into the background.

The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom offers a sobering case study. Once among the most significant member-owned enterprises in the world, the Co-op entered the 2010s in serious trouble. An investigation into its near-collapse revealed a decade of decisions shaped by competitive growth logic: major retail acquisitions, banking mergers, rapid diversification across sectors. The goal had been scale - more market presence, more revenue streams, more assets.

What the organisation had not been tracking with the same rigour was whether any of this expansion was coherent with what a cooperative is actually for. Its governance was member-based. Its legitimacy came from community trust. Its identity was inseparable from a set of values about how business ought to be conducted.

By the time a £1.5 billion hole appeared in the banking arm, the institution had been operating with someone else’s strategy for years. The tools it had borrowed rewarded growth metrics. They had no mechanism for asking whether growth was serving the mission - or consuming it.

The same drift appears in organisations across every sector.

• A humanitarian agency that chases high-visibility donor projects at the expense of quiet, unglamorous long-term work.

• A professional body that adds revenue streams until its membership can no longer articulate what the body stands for.

• A regional development authority that reports on outputs while the underlying social fabric it was created to strengthen continues to fray.

In each case, the damage is slow and largely invisible inside the planning documents that caused it.

Planning Built Around Purpose

What these organisations need is not a modified version of competitive planning. They need a process that begins with a different assumption — that strategy is about protecting and advancing a purpose across time, not about positioning against opponents.

1. Such a process starts with an honest reckoning with the present. Before any direction is set, the organisation needs to understand where it actually stands - not just financially, but in terms of mission integrity. How is trust held among the people the organisation serves? When has the institution historically drifted from its purpose, and what triggered those moments? What resources - financial, relational, reputational - are genuinely available?

2. From that foundation, a long horizon is established. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty years is typically productive. This might feel uncomfortably distant, but the distance is the point. It shifts the planning conversation away from quarterly anxieties and toward the questions that actually define an institution’s legacy.

3. With a target horizon in place, the team explores a range of possible futures rather than committing to a single premature forecast. The world in twenty-five years will be shaped by forces that cannot be predicted with precision - demographic shifts, technological change, political reconfigurations, ecological pressures. Scenario thinking does not pretend otherwise. It builds the capacity to navigate uncertainty rather than deny it, and it asks the organisation to identify which kind of future best allows its mission to flourish.

4. From a single chosen scenario, the planning process works backwards. If the organisation needs to be in a certain condition twenty-five years from now, what does the ten-year mark look like? The five-year mark? What must be in place, and by when? What are the big tradeoffs which need to be made? This backward mapping turns an inspiring long-term vision into a logical chain of necessary steps, each grounded in the one that follows it.

5. Only after that work is complete does it make sense to design a short-term action plan - because now there is a genuine strategic context for it. Immediate decisions are no longer just reactive. They serve something larger. Here, further tradeoffs must be made.

The Question Underneath the Question

The mechanics matter, but the conceptual shift matters more.

Competitive strategy is structured around the question: How do we beat them? Purpose-driven strategy is structured around a different one: How do we remain who we are, and do what we exist to do, across the years ahead?

These produce very different conversations - different discussions at leadership retreats, different criteria for investment decisions, different definitions of success that get embedded in the culture over time.

Cooperatives, civil society organisations, public institutions, and social enterprises are not inferior versions of private companies. They are different kinds of institutions altogether, built on different social contracts, accountable to different stakeholders, and serving purposes that exist precisely because markets and competitive logic have limits.

The strategy process these organisations use should reflect that - not apologise for it.

When the next retreat in your non-profit ends with a document that finally stays off the shelf, it will be because the planning process started from the right place: not how do we win, but how do we endure, and why does it matter that we do.

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P.S. Here are some LLM prompts you can use for further investigation.

Go Deeper: Five Prompts for Further Exploration

The argument in this article points to a gap — between the strategy tools most executives have been given and the organisations they are actually leading. The five prompts below are designed for use with any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar). Each one picks up where the article leaves off. Copy, paste, and adapt the parts in brackets to your own context.

Prompt 1: Diagnose Your Own Organisation

For the reader who finished the article thinking — “this is us.”

I lead a [cooperative / government agency / NGO / family business / religious institution / statutory body] in [country/region]. Based on the argument that most strategy frameworks were designed for competitive, profit-first organisations, help me diagnose whether my organisation has been using the wrong strategy tools.

Ask me five diagnostic questions — one at a time, waiting for my answer before moving to the next — that will reveal whether our strategy process is genuinely built around our mission and long time horizon, or whether we have been borrowing competitive frameworks that don’t fit.

After my five answers, give me an honest assessment of where we stand, and identify the single most dangerous misfit between the tools we are using and the organisation we actually are.

Prompt 2: Rebuild the Co-op’s Strategy — Non-Competitively

For the reader who found the Co-operative Group case study instructive and wants to go deeper.

The UK Co-operative Group’s near-collapse in 2013 has been attributed to governance failure and poor management. But a different diagnosis is possible: the Co-op was a mission-first, member-owned organisation that had adopted competitive private-sector strategy logic — chasing scale, acquisitions and market presence — instead of building strategy around what a cooperative is uniquely positioned to do.

Assume you are a strategy advisor brought in to the Co-op in 2005, before the Britannia merger and the Verde pursuit. Using only non-competitive strategy tools — scenario planning, category design, mission integrity analysis, and long-horizon thinking — build the outline of the strategic conversation the Co-op’s leadership should have been having. What questions should have been on the table? What 20-year opportunity was sitting unclaimed? What slow-moving threats should have been named? What would a purpose-first Co-op strategy for 2005–2030 have looked like?

Prompt 3: Design a Purpose-First Strategy Retreat

For the reader who is planning — or dreading — their next strategic planning offsite.

I need to design a two-day strategy retreat for the leadership team of a [describe your organisation type and size]. Our previous retreats have used standard frameworks — SWOT analysis, competitive positioning, priority matrices — and the resulting plans have consistently ended up on shelves.

The core problem is that those frameworks were designed for profit-first, competitor-facing businesses. We are a mission-first organisation with a long time horizon and no direct rival whose defeat would constitute success.

Design a full two-day retreat agenda that replaces competitive frameworks with purpose-built alternatives. Include: the opening question that reframes the entire conversation; how to run a scenario planning session for a non-technical audience; how to do backward mapping from a 25-year horizon to a 90-day action plan; and how to end the retreat with commitments that will actually survive contact with the following Monday morning.

Prompt 4: Make the Internal Case for Long-Term Thinking

For the reader who agrees with the argument but now has to convince a board or senior team that doesn’t.

I have read an argument that mission-driven organisations — cooperatives, government agencies, NGOs, religious institutions, family businesses — are systematically underserved by MBA-derived strategy frameworks because those frameworks were built for competitive, profit-first firms. I agree with this argument. My organisation is [describe it briefly].

The problem is that my board and senior leadership are not yet convinced. Several members have strong private-sector or MBA backgrounds and default to competitive strategy language. Others simply don’t see the urgency of changing our planning approach.

Help me build the internal case. Give me: three concrete examples of organisations like ours that failed — or significantly underperformed — because they used competitive strategy frameworks that didn’t fit; three compelling questions I can put to the board that will expose the mismatch without triggering defensiveness; and the single most persuasive one-paragraph argument I can make for why this matters now, not eventually.

Prompt 5: Apply Category Design to a Non-Competitive Organisation

For the reader intrigued by the article’s reference to category design as an alternative strategic tool.

Category design is a strategy framework developed primarily for technology and consumer companies. Its core idea is that instead of competing within an existing market, an organisation defines and dominates an entirely new category — changing what problem it is seen to solve and becoming the obvious answer to a question that previously wasn’t being asked.

I want to explore whether category design can be applied to a non-competitive organisation. My organisation is [describe: sector, size, core mission, approximate age, geographic context].

Walk me through a category design thinking process adapted for a mission-first organisation. Specifically: What category does my organisation currently occupy in the minds of the people it serves — and is that the right one? What problem could we redefine ourselves as the unique solution to? What would it mean for us to own a category rather than compete within one? And what is the 10-year version of success if we got this right?

A note on how to use these prompts: each one is a starting point, not a single exchange. The most productive approach is to begin the conversation, push back on the AI’s first response, add specifics about your own organisation, and treat the output as a thinking partner rather than a finished answer. Prompt 3 in particular benefits from iteration — run it once, then ask the AI to make the agenda harder, more honest, or more specific to your sector.

But sometimes the brutal truth is that the warning signs were there 20-years ago.

In this episode, Marcel Melzer stops the scroll with his contrarian claim: strategic decisions should take 48 hours, not months.

His “decision as a service” model combines strategic foresight with AI-augmented decision intelligence—delivering what traditional consulting takes 8 weeks to produce, in 2 days. The magic?

It’s not about perfect information. It’s about deciding at 80% confidence while your competitors are still scheduling meetings. We deconstruct a fictional case live, revealing why companies confuse firefighting with strategy, why past non-decisions create present disasters, and why the future belongs to leaders who can decide fast under uncertainty.

Jamaica just got hurricane-smashed—we need this yesterday.

You can view the full video below this line with a paid subscription.

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Picture this: A talented leadership team. Top-tier credentials. Flawless execution. Every metric trending green. And yet, five years later, the company is fighting for survival—or worse, gone entirely.

This isn’t a story about incompetence. It’s something far more insidious. It’s about intelligent people trapped inside a system that rewards them for making precisely the wrong choices.

The Athletic Metaphor That Explains Everything

Want to see this pattern in pure form? Look at how different sports organizations develop talent.

Jamaica’s MVP Track Club has produced Olympic champions and world record holders whose careers span decades. Athletes like Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson-Herah didn’t just win races—they sustained excellence well into their thirties, their bodies intact, their bank accounts healthy.

Meanwhile, the American collegiate athletics system—the NCAA—operates like a different species entirely. Talented high schoolers arrive with Olympic potential. Four years later, many flame out, never to compete internationally again. Bodies broken. Dreams abandoned.

Here’s what makes this fascinating: NCAA coaches aren’t incompetent. These are world-class professionals running billion-dollar programs with access to cutting-edge sports science. They track everything—times, splits, recovery metrics, nutrition, biomechanics.

Yet they’ve built a machine designed to extract maximum performance over four years, regardless of what happens afterward. The system optimizes perfectly—for conference championships, television contracts, recruitment rankings. And in the process, it systematically destroys the very athletes who make those outcomes possible.

MVP asked a different question entirely: What does success look like measured over a fifteen-year career instead of a four-year scholarship? The answer required sacrificing immediate gratification—forgoing certain meets, accepting slower progression, resisting the pressure to peak too early.

The NCAA doesn’t fail because its people are stupid. It fails because every incentive, every measurement, every reward structure points them toward short-term glory and long-term destruction. And every dashboard they monitor confirms they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do—right up until the athlete graduates broken.

Now here’s the uncomfortable question: Is your company running the NCAA playbook?

The Corporate Version of Athletic Destruction

Corporate history is littered with smart people making decisions that looked brilliant on every spreadsheet while quietly demolishing the foundation beneath them.

Consider the financial sector meltdowns of recent decades. Before the 2008 crisis, before Enron, before the savings and loan disasters of the 1980s, things looked spectacular. Quarterly earnings beat expectations. Risk models showed green lights. Executives earned accolades for innovative financial engineering.

The long-term destruction was being created from day one. Not by people too stupid to see it, but by systems designed never to look for it.

Why Intelligence Doesn’t Protect You

The trap works like this: The CEO who sacrifices this quarter’s numbers to protect next decade’s foundation doesn’t get applauded at the board meeting. They get questioned. Their judgment gets doubted. Their compensation takes a hit.

Meanwhile, the executive who delivers short-term wins—even by mortgaging the future—gets promoted, celebrated, interviewed by business publications.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence, discipline, or execution. It’s a design flaw in how success gets measured.

The answer isn’t working harder within the existing framework. It’s redesigning the framework itself. That requires confronting existential questions about what you’re actually optimizing for—and having the courage to challenge metrics that everyone agrees are “obviously” correct.

Three Techniques to Surface Hidden Disasters

Here are practical methods to force your leadership team to see beyond the quarterly mirage:

1. The Pre-Mortem Exercise

Gather your strategy team. Give them one instruction: Assume your current initiative has failed catastrophically fifteen years from now. Write the detailed story of exactly how and why.

Not vague organizational hand-wringing like “we didn’t execute well enough.” A specific, uncomfortable narrative that traces the chain of consequences from today’s confident decision to tomorrow’s wreckage.

The discipline is in the specificity. “We lost market share” is useless. “We optimized our pricing algorithm for immediate margin expansion, which slowly trained our best customers to view us as a commodity, which eroded pricing power, which forced us into a desperate discount spiral that destroyed brand equity and made us vulnerable to a well-funded competitor who simply waited us out” is useful.

2. The Second-Order Impact Map

Most strategy discussions evaluate immediate effects and stop there. “This restructuring reduces overhead by 18%.” Applause. Meeting adjourned.

The second-order map refuses to stop. It forces the room to keep pulling the thread: That cost reduction eliminates redundancy. Which reduces organizational resilience. Which means the next market shock hits harder. Which forces emergency measures. Which creates exactly the kind of chaos that drives your best people to competitors. Who use them to build what you should have built.

Keep pulling until the consequences become uncomfortable enough to reconsider the decision.

3. The Twenty-Years-Later Role Play

Identify the youngest person in your leadership team. They become a time traveler.

It’s twenty years in the future. A new generation of leaders asks them: “What was it like in that 2026 strategy session? What did your team decide?”

They respond with two scenarios. First, the courage scenario: “We confronted the hardest questions. We acknowledged uncomfortable truths. We made decisions that hurt short-term but protected long-term. Here’s how it played out.”

Second, the cowardice scenario: “We pretended things we knew weren’t true. We optimized for looking good rather than being good. We told ourselves comfortable lies. Here’s the price we paid.”

The technique works because it makes abstract future consequences feel visceral and immediate.

The Choice That Defines Leadership

Every organization faces the same fundamental question: Are you building an MVP or running an NCAA program?

Are you optimizing for sustainable excellence or spectacular quarterly performance? Are you protecting the foundation or mining it for short-term gains?

The smartest people in the room will keep making the worst decisions until the room itself gets redesigned. Until the metrics change. Until the incentives shift. Until the questions being asked force long-term consequences into immediate view.

The techniques exist. The choice is whether you have the courage to use them.

P.S. Five Prompts for Deeper Reflection

Use these with your preferred AI to explore how these patterns might be operating in your specific context:

1. “I’m a [your role] at a [your industry] company. We’re currently optimizing for [your key metric]. Help me identify what long-term value we might be destroying in the process. Be brutally specific about the chain of consequences I’m not seeing.”

2. “Run a pre-mortem analysis: It’s 2040, and the strategy we implemented in 2025 has failed catastrophically. Write the detailed story of how our decision to [your current initiative] led to our downfall. Don’t hold back on uncomfortable specifics.”

3. “I need a second-order impact map. Our first-order effect from [your decision] is [immediate outcome]. Help me trace at least five levels deeper into the consequences, particularly the ones that would take years to surface but would be devastating when they do.”

4. “Create a dialogue between my 2025 self and my 2045 self. The older version has lived through the consequences of [current strategic choice]. What would they tell me that I’m not willing to hear right now?”

5. “Analyze my industry through the NCAA vs MVP lens. Who in my competitive landscape is running the short-term optimization playbook? Who’s building for decades? What specific metrics distinguish them? What would it cost me to switch approaches?”

Companies obsess over documenting financial controls. They create detailed procedure manuals for operations. Yet when it comes to transferring strategic thinking between executives, most organizations fail spectacularly.

The problem isn’t a lack of documentation. It’s documenting the wrong things entirely.

The Six-Month Struggle Every Incoming Executive Faces

Here’s a scenario playing out in boardrooms worldwide: A seasoned executive departs. Their replacement inherits comprehensive transition materials—market analyses, strategic frameworks, financial models, implementation roadmaps, organizational diagrams, and risk assessments.

The incoming leader dedicates weeks to reviewing everything. They schedule meetings with key stakeholders. They take copious notes. They ask intelligent questions.

Six months later, they’re still struggling to make strategic calls with the confidence their predecessor demonstrated. They hesitate where the former leader acted decisively. They miss contextual nuances that seem obvious in hindsight.

What went wrong?

Nothing and everything. The documentation was thorough. The transition process followed best practices. But the handoff materials contained polished conclusions instead of strategic thinking itself.

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about how strategic capability actually transfers between leaders.

What Your Transition Documents Are Actually Missing

Those transition binders look impressive. They contain everything a rational person would consider important: competitive threat assessments organized by market segment, positioning frameworks with detailed differentiation matrices, three-scenario financial projections, milestone-dependent implementation schedules, and comprehensive risk mitigation plans.

The critical gap? None of these materials explain how the organization arrived at its current strategic direction.

The genesis moment goes undocumented. Was the strategic pivot triggered by nearly losing a major client? Did a competitor’s unexpected move force a rethink? Did a board member ask an uncomfortable question that wouldn’t go away?

The discovery process remains invisible. What initial research contradicted long-held assumptions? Which sacred cows got sacrificed? When did the leadership team realize their comfortable worldview was dangerously wrong?

The human drama gets erased. That intense multi-day retreat where Finance and Operations clashed over resource priorities? Forgotten. The skeptical VP who opposed the initiative before becoming its most passionate advocate? Airbrushed out. The moment someone finally said what everyone was thinking but nobody wanted to acknowledge? Lost forever.

Most leadership teams justify these omissions with variations of: “That’s just internal politics. It’s unprofessional. The new executive needs our decisions, not our dirty laundry.”

This thinking is precisely backwards.

Why Messy Origin Stories Create Strategic Ownership

Consider two incoming executives facing the same strategic direction.

Executive A receives polished slide decks explaining the final strategic framework. Clean. Professional. Complete.

Executive B receives the full origin story: the triggering incident, the initial resistance, the data that changed minds, the fierce debates, the breakthrough moments, the implementation battles.

Three months later, both executives face pressure to abandon elements of the strategy. Market conditions have shifted. Key stakeholders are pushing for different priorities. Quick wins from alternative approaches look tempting.

Executive A, having only received conclusions, treats the strategy as inherited wisdom. They lack emotional investment. When challenged, they can recite the framework but can’t defend its foundations. They become susceptible to any argument that sounds reasonable because they never witnessed why alternative approaches were rejected.

Executive B, understanding the battle scars, responds differently. They know which assumptions were tested and survived. They understand which stakeholder concerns were addressed and how. They recognize which seductive alternatives were explicitly considered and rejected, and why. This knowledge creates conviction.

The messiness isn’t an embarrassing artifact to hide. It’s the mechanism that transforms a successor from a strategy executor into a strategy guardian.

Without origin stories, you’re handing someone a map without teaching them how to read terrain. They can follow the route you marked, but they can’t navigate when conditions change.

How Mental Models Beat Exhaustive Analysis

The second critical gap involves transferring strategic thinking patterns rather than strategic conclusions.

Your comprehensive transition documents provide analysis. What incoming executives actually need are the model that generated that analysis.

Consider a healthcare organization undertaking strategic transformation. Traditional handoff approach: a 200-page document detailing market research, competitive positioning, customer segmentation, channel strategy, technology roadmap, and financial projections.

Alternative approach: “We’re becoming the Netflix of healthcare.”

That single sentence does more strategic work than 200 pages ever could. It instantly conveys: subscription relationships over transactional interactions, integrated digital experiences instead of fragmented touchpoints, platform thinking rather than service delivery, customer lifetime value over point-of-sale margins.

An incoming executive who internalizes this pattern can make hundreds of subsequent decisions aligned with strategic intent—without referring back to documentation. The pattern provides a mental model for evaluating new opportunities, prioritizing resources, and making trade-offs.

Analysis answers specific questions. Patterns teach strategic thinking.

Most transition documents fail here because outgoing executives don’t explicitly name the strategic patterns they’re using. These frameworks remain implicit—obvious to the departing leader but invisible to their successor.

Creating Genuine Strategic Urgency

The third missing element is the diagnostic story that explains why the current strategy became necessary.

Generic problem statements fill transition documents: “Market conditions are evolving.” “We need to maintain competitive advantage.” “Customer expectations are changing.”

These platitudes don’t create urgency. They create checkbox compliance.

Contrast that with a genuine diagnostic story: “Our analysis revealed we were Blockbuster in 2005. We had dominant market share, strong brand recognition, and profitable operations. We were also completely vulnerable. While we defended a dying business model, our industry’s Netflix equivalent was growing 40% annually. Our window for strategic response was roughly 18 months before our competitive position would become unrecoverable.”

That’s a diagnostic story with teeth. It explains why inaction represented an existential threat, not merely a missed opportunity. It creates urgency by making the stakes visceral and the timeline concrete.

Start Building Your Strategic Story Library Today

Most executives struggle to capture these three story types because they haven’t developed pattern recognition for what makes strategic stories effective. You need exposure to dozens of transformation cases before your mind identifies the underlying structures.

The solution? Deliberate practice

with real business transformation narratives.

Start by studying how successful leaders explain their strategic pivots. Look for moments when executives describe “how we nearly missed this” or “why we became the [X] of our industry.” These moments contain the raw material for powerful strategic stories.

But finding quality transformation case studies scattered across YouTube and business media takes time—time most executives don’t have. That’s why platforms like StratCinema.org exist: to curate business transformation stories specifically for strategists developing this narrative fluency. Instead of algorithm-driven suggestions that keep you watching but not learning, you get carefully selected case studies that build pattern recognition.

Your next leadership transition deserves better than polished slide decks. It requires origin stories that create ownership, pattern stories that transfer mental models, and diagnostic stories that sustain urgency. Document these with the same rigor you apply to financial controls, and your successor won’t just execute your strategy—they’ll defend and evolve it.

P.S. Use AI to Capture Your Strategic Stories

Don’t have time to craft these stories from scratch? Modern AI tools can help you extract and structure the strategic narratives already in your head. Here are three sets of prompts—one for each story type—that you can use with any large language model to develop handoff materials that actually transfer strategic thinking.

Origin Story Prompts

“I need to document how our [specific strategic initiative] actually came together. Help me structure an origin story by asking me questions about: What triggered our initial concern? What was the ‘oh shit’ moment that made this urgent? Who were the initial skeptics and what convinced them? What data or insights contradicted our assumptions? What internal conflicts emerged during planning? Which alternatives did we seriously consider and reject? What breakthrough moment changed our approach? Walk me through these questions one at a time, then help me shape my answers into a compelling narrative that shows future leaders why this strategy emerged and what obstacles we overcame.”

Pattern Story Prompts

“Our strategy can be summarized as ‘[our approach]’ but I need to articulate the mental model behind it. Help me identify the pattern we’re following by asking: What successful company or strategy are we emulating? What’s our ‘[X] of [Y]’ statement? What core principle guides our decision-making? What trade-offs does this pattern naturally suggest? What does this pattern tell us to prioritize versus ignore? If someone internalized this pattern, what decisions would they make differently? Help me craft a concise pattern statement that transfers strategic intuition, not just strategic conclusions. Make it memorable enough that leaders can apply it without consulting documentation.”

Diagnostic Story Prompts

“I need to explain why our strategy was necessary—not just beneficial. Help me create a diagnostic story that conveys genuine urgency by asking: What complacent narrative were we telling ourselves before? What data revealed our vulnerability? What competitor or market shift threatened our position? What timeline were we facing? What would failure have looked like? What historical business failure does our situation resemble? Help me structure this into a narrative that makes inaction feel existential, not merely suboptimal. The goal is to transfer the visceral urgency we felt when we realized we had to transform.”

Will your organization survive the next 25 years? More importantly, are the decisions you’re making today planting the seeds of future irrelevance?

The US Coast Guard wrestled with these questions and discovered something counterintuitive: to truly understand today’s challenges, you need to view them from 25 years in the future. Their Project Evergreen initiative proved this—but only after failing spectacularly for 15 years first.

The Expensive Lesson: Brilliant Strategy, Zero Implementation

Imagine pouring 15 years into strategic planning. Your organization assembles the best minds, conducts sophisticated scenario workshops, and produces detailed roadmaps. The forecasts are prescient. The analysis is sharp. The strategies are comprehensive.

Then everything hits reality and dies on impact.

This was Project Evergreen’s painful trajectory. Every strategic plan they delivered landed, in their words, “like most additional work at an office with an already full plate: dead on arrival.” Inbox after inbox received these plans. Nearly all went unimplemented.

The Coast Guard had built “isolated, independent cogs” that required “considerable effort to forcefully engage into the many turning mechanisms” of actual organizational planning. Picture trying to force a rigid gear into machinery that’s already running—that’s what executing these strategies felt like for frontline teams.

Why did meticulously crafted strategies produce such dismal results?

The Question That Poisoned 15 Years of Planning

For a decade and a half, Project Evergreen asked what seemed like a perfectly reasonable question: “What should the Coast Guard do?”

If you’ve sat through strategic planning sessions, this probably sounds familiar. It’s typically the first question on the agenda. What should we do about artificial intelligence? How should we respond to digital transformation? What’s our climate change strategy?

The problem isn’t obvious at first glance. This question appears logical, even necessary. But it creates a fatal dynamic.

When you ask “What should we do?” you’re asking workshop participants—typically senior strategists and consultants—to prescribe solutions. These prescriptions then get handed down to implementers who weren’t in the room and didn’t shape the solutions. As the Coast Guard discovered, “the ideal people to do the job might not be in the room.”

This creates what I call supply-side strategy: strategists manufacture solutions and push them onto implementers. Those solutions arrive as rigid directives disconnected from operational reality.

The fundamental flaw isn’t that strategists are separated from implementers—there are simply too many implementers to fit in a retreat. The flaw is the question itself.

Present-Forward Thinking: Perfect for Tactics, Fatal for Transformation

That innocent-sounding question—”What should we do?”—invisibly locks your thinking into a present-forward orientation.

Present-forward thinking starts with today. It analyzes current problems, extrapolates existing trends, and prescribes solutions based on incremental projections. This approach works brilliantly for everyday management. It’s ideal for hitting quarterly targets, solving operational problems, and managing predictable challenges.

But for 25-year transformation? It’s disastrous.

Why? Because present-forward thinking generates tactical responses to current conditions. It can’t account for fundamental shifts in your organization’s operating environment. It can’t help you prepare for demands that don’t yet exist. It treats the future as a slightly modified version of today.

Case in point: In 2001, Kodak had abundant, recent evidence that digital photography was no threat to traditional business. The present-forward mindset dominated the thinking of executives and blocked the possibilities.

Managers use present-forward thinking each day because it’s the default mode for problem-solving. But that’s exactly why it fails for long-range strategy. This familiar mode becomes invisible, and organizations apply it to challenges it was never designed to address.

The Cognitive Shift That Changed Everything

After 15 years of failure, the Coast Guard discovered the fundamental shift required: from present-forward to future-back thinking.

This framework, developed by strategy theorists Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, represents a complete cognitive reorientation. Instead of starting with today’s problems and projecting forward, you start with 2050’s probable demands and work backward.

The new question becomes: “What demands will the organization face?”

This isn’t semantic trickery. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about strategy.

When the Coast Guard made this shift, they began identifying what they call “robust strategic needs”—outcomes required by specific long-term futures, each demanding particular strategic responses.

Here’s the critical difference: prescriptive solutions constrain implementers. Strategic needs empower them.

Prescriptions say “do this.” Strategic needs say “accomplish this outcome”—and then trust implementers to craft solutions suited to their specific contexts and the evolving reality they’re navigating.

How Future-Back Thinking Works in Practice

Project Evergreen now runs workshops that map multiple plausible 2050 scenarios. They explore various futures the Coast Guard might face—different geopolitical landscapes, climate conditions, technological capabilities, maritime threats.

Then something critical happens. As the project team explained: “The solution space had to be left to the people who were actually going to implement the solution.”

Instead of receiving detailed instructions, implementers receive strategic needs. They’re asked to “deconstruct and then reconstruct” these needs for their specific operational contexts.

This approach works because objectives spanning 25 years can’t be prescribed with any accuracy. The future will unfold in unexpected ways. Game-changing strategies require flexible frameworks that can adapt as conditions evolve. Strategic needs provide that framework. Rigid tactical plans don’t.

The result: Project Evergreen became what they call a “backdoor strategic contributor”—guiding organizational direction without constraining operational flexibility.

The 2025 Payoff from 2050 Thinking

Here’s where this approach delivers immediate value.

Future-back thinking reveals which of today’s “urgent” priorities are actually superfluous. When you clearly understand the demands your organization will face in 25 years, some current problems simply fade in importance. The larger perspective exposes which fires are worth fighting and which will burn out on their own.

This prevents wasting resources on solutions that won’t address actual long-term demands.

It also transforms implementer motivation. Instead of following someone else’s prescriptions, teams gain the autonomy to design solutions matched to their reality. That autonomy—the flexibility to meet strategic needs in contextually appropriate ways—creates genuine engagement and inspiration.

Applying This to Your Organization

Consider your organization’s long-range planning through this lens.

The present-forward approach asks: “What should we do about immediate challenges?” This generates aspirational goals—”become industry leader,” “achieve digital transformation,” “reach carbon neutrality”—often disconnected from implementation reality. These sound impressive in board presentations but provide little practical guidance for teams expected to deliver them.

The future-back approach asks: “What demands will our organization face in 2050?” This identifies strategic needs that divisions must customize for their contexts.

For example, rather than prescribing “implement AI across all functions, ”you might identify a strategic need for “decision-making capabilities that scale with data complexity.” Different departments can then develop solutions suited to their unique challenges—customer service might deploy conversational AI, logistics might focus on predictive routing, finance might build automated risk assessment.

A flexible framework instead of a rigid mandate.

The Counterintuitive Truth

The Coast Guard’s expensive lesson offers a counterintuitive truth: you need tomorrow’s perspective to understand today’s priorities.

Organizations that begin with present-forward thinking remain trapped in tactical responses to current conditions. They mistake busy-work for strategy. They confuse detailed plans with transformation.

Organizations that embrace future-back thinking gain something more valuable: clarity about which current actions actually matter for long-term survival.

That 25-year horizon isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about developing the perspective to distinguish signal from noise in the present.

The question isn’t whether your organization will face existential demands by 2050. It will. The question is whether you’re building the strategic foundation today to meet those demands—or whether you’re sowing the seeds of irrelevance while obsessing over quarterly results.

The answer starts with asking a different question.

Source: Project Evergreen’s Long-Range Strategic Planning, United States Naval Institute