The Collective Sigh

The projector hums at a steady 25 decibels, a low-frequency vibration that seems to harmonize with the collective sigh of 125 employees. We are sitting in the main assembly hall, and the air is exactly 75 degrees-five degrees too warm for anyone to stay truly conscious. At the front of the room, our CEO is clicking through the 45th slide of a presentation titled ‘The FY25 Vision: Five Pillars of Transcendence.’ It is a beautiful document. The kerning is perfect. The stock photos of diverse people pointing at holographic charts are inspiring.

But as I look around, I see Robin B.-L., an ergonomics consultant who was brought in to fix our literal lumbar support, shaking their head at the posture of the executive team. Robin leans over to me and whispers that the slouching in the third row is a clinical sign of ‘organizational scoliosis.’ It’s a joke, I think, but the physical reality is hard to ignore. We have spent nearly 5 months-or roughly 25 weeks of high-intensity retreats-crafting this document. We went to a resort that cost $1005 per night per person. We used 55 different colored sticky notes. We debated the difference between ‘synergy’ and ‘alignment’ for 15 hours. And yet, looking at the faces of the developers and the customer success leads, it is clear that this strategy is a work of fiction. It is a high-budget movie that everyone is being forced to watch, but no one believes they are in the cast.

I’m writing this under a cloud of personal frustration. Just ten minutes ago, I accidentally closed 15 browser tabs. All my research, all the tabs I had meticulously organized to justify my skepticism of corporate planning, vanished into the digital void. The tabs are gone. The strategy is closed. We are back to the default settings of our daily chaos.

The Secular Liturgy

By standing on a stage and declaring ‘The Five Pillars,’ leadership is performing an act of magic. They believe that by naming a reality, they create it. But naming ‘Innovation’ as a pillar does not magically fix the fact that our legacy software takes 45 minutes to compile a simple report. Naming ‘Customer-Centricity’ does not change the reality that the support team is drowning in 505 tickets a day with no new hires in sight. The document is a shield. If we have a plan, we don’t have to face the terrifying truth that we are just a collection of people trying to keep our heads above water.

Robin B.-L. moves to the back of the room, adjusting a standing desk for a junior designer who looks like they’re about to slide off their chair. Robin’s job is to fix the immediate, the tangible, the physical. They don’t care about the 15-year vision; they care about the 5-degree angle of a computer monitor. There is a profound lesson in that. This disconnect isn’t just a communication gap; it’s a structural failure. It creates a deep, resonant cynicism. When employees see a slide about ‘Empowerment’ while they are being micromanaged over 25-cent expenses, the strategy doesn’t just fail-it backfires. It teaches the staff that words have no meaning.

The Safe Numbers Game

Let’s talk about the ‘Five Pillars.’ Why is it always 5? Or 15? It’s never 4. It’s never 6. We gravitate toward these round, safe numbers because they feel stable. They look good on a poster in the breakroom that 95 percent of the staff will walk past without reading. I once worked at a place that had ‘The 15 Values.’ By the time you got to value number 5, you had already forgotten value number 1. By the time you got to value 15, you were wondering if the company was a cult or a hardware store. The ritual of planning is a way for executives to feel like they are in control of a chaotic system. It’s much easier to design a slide than it is to actually change the behavior of 255 people.

I find myself thinking about those closed tabs again. The loss of that data was a shock, but five minutes later, I realized I could probably reconstruct the important parts from memory. The fluff was gone, but the core survived. Maybe that’s what should happen to strategy. We should throw the 45-slide deck into the fire and see what we can remember the next morning. Most people can only hold 5 key concepts in their head at once, and even then, they need to be relevant to their actual lives.

Friction vs. Pillars

In the real world-the one Robin B.-L. navigates with their measuring tapes and ergonomic cushions-results are measured by the absence of pain. In business, results should be measured by the removal of friction. This is where the fiction of the strategy meets the friction of the operation. Most strategies add friction. They add new reporting layers, new ‘initiatives’ that are just extra meetings, and new KPIs that require 25 extra clicks to track. We should be doing the opposite. We should be looking for ways to automate the mundane so that the ‘Vision’ can actually happen.

When you are actually in the trenches, dealing with the fallout of a system that wasn’t designed for the humans using it, you stop caring about the ‘Pillars.’ You start looking for tools that work. You look for ways to bridge the gap between what the boss said on stage and what the customer is screaming about on the phone. This is the space where Aissist operates-not in the airy-fairy world of 55-page strategy documents, but in the immediate, operational reality of getting things done. It’s about the tangible. It’s about the fact that while you’re debating Pillar 5, there are 105 customers who need an answer right now.

Manager Credit vs. Real Productivity Gain

I once saw a manager spend 45 minutes explaining a new ‘Workflow Optimization Strategy’ to a team that didn’t have functioning keyboards. Robin B.-L. was there that day too, looking at the cramped wrists of the data entry team. Robin didn’t say anything about the strategy. They just walked out to their car, brought in 15 gel wrist rests, and handed them out. The team’s productivity went up by 25 percent the next week. The manager took credit for it, citing his ‘Optimization Strategy.’ That is the corporate cycle in a nutshell. We mistake the physical relief of a fixed problem for the success of an abstract plan.

The Linguistic Shell Game

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being lied to with a smile. The ‘Vision’ presentations are always delivered with such practiced enthusiasm. The CEO’s voice goes up 5 decibels. The hand gestures become more expansive. But the audience can feel the lack of weight. It’s like being served a photograph of a steak when you’re starving. You can see the marbling, you can see the grill marks, but you can’t eat it. And if you try to point out that it’s just paper, you’re labeled as ‘not a team player’ or ‘resistant to change.’

Robin B.-L. tells me that the most ergonomic thing you can do during a long meeting is to stand up and walk out. Not as a protest, but as a biological necessity. Our bodies aren’t meant to hold the same position for 85 minutes while being bombarded by blue light and corporate jargon. Our minds aren’t meant for it either. We reach a point of cognitive saturation after about 25 minutes. Everything after that is just noise. The CEO is currently on slide 45, and I can practically see the noise spilling out of people’s ears.

The Organism vs. The Document

Closing the Clutter

The irony is that the people who write these plans actually believe them. They aren’t trying to be deceptive. They are just as trapped in the ritual as we are. They believe that if they can just get the document right, the company will follow. It’s a form of sympathetic magic. But the company is not a document; it’s a living, breathing, slouching organism. It’s a collection of people like Robin B.-L. and the designers and the support staff who are all just trying to find a chair that doesn’t hurt their back.

If we want to change things, we have to stop worshiping the document. We have to start looking at the floor. We have to look at the 55 small things that go wrong every day and fix them one by one. Strategy should be a byproduct of doing things well, not a prerequisite. It should be the story we tell about what we’ve already achieved, not a fairy tale about what we might do if we somehow become different people.

The Unspoken Conclusion

We don’t need a better plan. We need a better reality. We need to stop pretending that a beautiful PDF can replace the hard, messy work of supporting the people who actually do the work. The slides are gone now, the screen is blank, and for the first time today, I feel like we might actually get something done. I’ll start by reopening my tabs-but this time, only 5 of them.