The Corporate Seance We Call a Five-Year Plan
The air in here has the texture of lukewarm gelatin. A low hum from the projector fan is the only thing moving. On screen, a slide titled ‘Q3 2028: Deep Dive & Synergistic Alignment’ glows with the unearned confidence of a horoscope. Mark, our VP of Blue-Sky Thinking, is pointing a red laser at a bullet point so vague it could be about launching a satellite or changing the brand of coffee in the breakroom. We have been in this room for five hours, meticulously planning a future that feels less plausible than time travel, while our entire industry is being rewritten by a tool that was a graduate student’s thesis 15 months ago.
This is the ritual. The great corporate seance where we attempt to contact the spirit of the future and ask it for stock projections. We spend months and a budget of at least $45,575 on consultants to produce a 235-page document that will be functionally obsolete before the ink dries. It’s an act of collective delusion, an elaborate stage play we perform to convince ourselves that the universe is a tidy spreadsheet, not a glorious, chaotic storm.
The Illusion of Control
I spent last weekend assembling a flat-pack bookshelf. The instructions were a masterclass in clean design and logical progression. A beautiful, laminated plan. Except piece G was drilled incorrectly, and one of the crucial M5 screws was missing entirely. The whole plan, so perfect on paper, shattered on contact with a single, dumb manufacturing error. I ended up with a wobbly, insecure structure held together with a combination of wood glue, sheer willpower, and a few choice words. And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s a plan for a static object in a controlled environment. We’re trying to build a plan for a dynamic organization in an economy that has the attention span of a squirrel on three espressos.
We pretend we’re building a cathedral, carefully placing each stone according to a grand blueprint. In reality, we’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and the most useful skill isn’t reading a map; it’s patching leaks and spotting driftwood we can lash to the side.
The entire exercise is about managing anxiety. It’s a security blanket woven from Gantt charts and KPIs. The real goal isn’t to predict the future; it’s to create a document that absolves us of responsibility when that future inevitably refuses to cooperate. “Well,” we’ll say in 2028, staring at the smoking crater of our projections, “it wasn’t in the plan.” As if the plan were a binding legal contract with reality itself.
A Better Approach: Designing for Chaos
I once had a fascinating conversation with a woman named Julia J.P., whose entire profession felt like an antidote to this nonsense. Her specialty was complex queue management. Not just standing in line, but designing the flow of thousands of unpredictable humans through theme parks, emergency rooms, and data processing centers. She didn’t have a five-year plan. She had a five-minute plan, a five-second plan, and a set of principles.
Her job wasn’t to force people into a pre-ordained path. It was to build a system so resilient and responsive that it could absorb thousands of tiny, unpredictable deviations and still function. She focused on widening paths, cross-training staff, and creating clear, simple signage. Her system was built for chaos, not for compliance. She measured success not by adherence to a plan, but by throughput and a lack of fistfights. Imagine that.
It makes me wonder about all the resources we pour into these strategic offsites. The brainpower trapped in this beige room could probably solve actual, present-day problems. We could be improving our current product, talking to our actual customers, or fixing the bugs that have been in the backlog for 25 weeks. Instead, we’re debating the hypothetical market share of a product that doesn’t exist, for a customer demographic that hasn’t been born yet.
It’s an expensive form of procrastination.
The Freedom in Not Knowing
There’s a strange freedom in admitting you don’t know. It’s terrifying, but it’s also the starting point for genuine innovation. The five-year plan is the opposite of that freedom. It’s a cage we build for ourselves out of assumptions. It locks in thinking, codifies old problems, and makes it organizationally painful to pivot when a brilliant, unexpected opportunity-or a devastating threat-appears on the horizon. Agility becomes a liability, because it deviates from The Document.
I confess, this is a total contradiction. I rail against these massive, futile plans, but I spent two hours last week creating a ridiculously detailed, color-coded spreadsheet to manage my vegetable garden planting schedule. I know full well that aphids, a surprise frost, or a lazy squirrel could render it completely useless. I did it anyway. Why? Because planning a 15-foot patch of dirt feels manageable. The act of creating the plan provides a small, satisfying hit of control in a world that offers precious little of it. The illusion is comforting, but I don’t bet my entire vegetable supply on it. I also have canned goods in the pantry. The corporate five-year plan is like betting the entire company food supply on the flawless execution of a garden plan during a hurricane.
The real work isn’t in drafting the perfect five-year prophecy. It’s in building the organizational muscle for the five-minute pivot. It’s about training teams to see what’s actually in front of them, not what the plan says should be there. It’s about creating a culture where someone can stand up and say, “This map is wrong,” without being accused of heresy. It requires less time in boardrooms looking at projections and more time on the ground, developing situational awareness. The skills we need are improvisation, rapid prototyping, and ruthless prioritization-not astrology.
Sometimes, the most strategic thing you can do is abandon the strategy session entirely. To walk out of the stale air and do something small, real, and immediate. To fix a known bug. To call a customer. To clear your head by engaging with the physical world, where cause and effect are refreshingly direct. You put the blue paint on the canvas, and the canvas becomes blue. There is no committee to debate the long-term synergistic implications of the color choice. Getting a set of art supplies and creating something, anything, in a single afternoon provides a more profound sense of accomplishment than a thousand pages of five-year fantasy. It’s a reminder that we can exert control and create value on a human scale, in the present moment.
Static Plan
We talk about building a moat around our business. For decades, that moat was a good plan. Now, the moat is speed. It’s adaptability. It’s the ability to learn and unlearn faster than the competition. The only plan that matters is the plan for today, and the principle of being ready for a completely different plan tomorrow.
Julia J.P. once mentioned that the most expensive and useless things in her theme parks were the static, five-year-old maps encased in plexiglass. People would stare at them, confused, because the reality of the park had already evolved. The most valuable tools were the digital signs she could update in five seconds, redirecting crowds away from a temporarily closed ride or toward a new attraction. Her goal wasn’t to have a perfect map; it was to have a living one. Our businesses are theme parks, not cathedrals. The visitors are unpredictable, rides break down, and new attractions appear overnight. We need fewer architects of the future and more people who know how to manage the queue right now.