The Ritual of the Unglued Dream

The neon green sticky note is losing its adhesive grip, curling away from the textured beige wallpaper of the Hyatt Regency’s ‘Oak Ballroom B’ with a slow, agonizing inevitability. I am currently pressing my thumb against it, trying to make ‘Disruptive Synergies’ stay put, but the wall-like the 13 people in this room-seems to be rejecting the premise entirely. My thumb leaves a faint, oily smudge on the paper. This is the 3rd hour of our 23-hour retreat, and we have already exhausted the supply of sparkling water and our collective patience for the term ‘pivot.’

There is a specific smell to these rooms. It is a mixture of industrial carpet cleaner, stale coffee breath, and the faint, ozone-heavy scent of an overworked laser projector. We are here to plan the future, or so the memo said. But as I look at the whiteboard, I see the ghost of last year’s ‘Strategic Roadmap’ underneath the current one, a faint smear of blue marker that never quite wiped clean. We are performing a secular religious ritual. We have gathered in a sacred, out-of-the-way space (a suburban hotel) to offer sacrifices (time and $433 per head in catering) to a deity that doesn’t exist: the God of Perfect Alignment.

The Safety Inspector and The Grounding Reality

My friend Drew H. is a playground safety inspector. He is a man who deals with the physical world in its most unforgiving forms. When Drew H. looks at a playground, he doesn’t see ‘Blue Sky Innovations.’ He sees a 13-inch gap that could become a head-entrapment zone for a curious toddler. He sees 3 points of failure in a rusted chain link. He understands that the ground is the most important part of the play area. If the surfacing-the woodchips or the poured rubber-isn’t 13 centimeters deep in the high-impact zones, nothing else matters. The height of the slide is irrelevant if the landing is concrete.

In our corporate ‘playground,’ we spend 83% of our time talking about the slide and 0% talking about the landing. We talk about the heights of our ambition while ignoring the hard, jagged reality of our execution. We want to be ‘innovative’ but we aren’t willing to talk about why the 43 people in the marketing department haven’t spoken to the 23 people in product development since the 3rd quarter of last year. That conversation is uncomfortable. It requires addressing ego, budget silos, and the fact that Steve from accounting hates the way the sales team handles expenses. So, instead of talking about Steve, we do trust falls or we build towers out of 23 strands of spaghetti and a single marshmallow.

The Defense Mechanism of Abstraction

We treat strategy as an abstract art form rather than a mechanical necessity. There is a profound disconnect between the ‘strategic’ and the ‘practical’ that feels almost intentional. It’s a defense mechanism.

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If the strategy is abstract enough, no one can be blamed for its failure. If the goal is ‘To be the premier provider of holistic excellence,’ then everyone can claim victory while doing exactly what they were doing before. But real work isn’t abstract. Real work has weight. It has grain. It has a specific measurement that must be met.

When you think about the places where precision actually matters-where the theory has to meet the literal floor-you realize how performative these offsites are. For instance, consider the expertise required at Bathroom Remodel. They don’t have the luxury of ‘Blue Sky’ thinking when a client needs 1303 square feet of hardwood installed over a subfloor that’s as uneven as a mountain range. You can’t ‘brainstorm’ a level floor. You can’t ‘synergize’ a grout line into existence. You have to measure, you have to account for the physical constraints of the room, and you have to execute with a level of precision that makes the ‘Blue Sky’ whiteboard look like a child’s finger painting. They deal with the immediate, the tangible, and the permanent.

But here, in Oak Ballroom B, we are allergic to the tangible. We are told that this is the most important work we will do all year, yet we all know that the ‘output’ of this session-the 3 binders and the 133 high-resolution photos of the flipcharts-will be filed away in a digital folder that no one will open until it’s time to prepare for next year’s retreat.

The False Sense of Sturdiness

Drew H. once told me that the most dangerous part of a playground isn’t the equipment that looks scary; it’s the equipment that looks safe but has been poorly maintained. A bridge that feels sturdy but has 3 loose bolts hidden beneath the handrail. That’s what these offsites create: a false sense of sturdiness. We walk away feeling ‘aligned’ because we all agreed on a set of vague values like ‘Integrity’ or ‘Customer-First.’ But we didn’t agree on how to handle the 33% drop in retention or the 13 bugs that have been sitting in the backlog for 63 days. We’ve built a bridge with loose bolts and painted it a bright, optimistic yellow.

It’s a temporary suspension of reality. For 23 hours, we are not a group of stressed-out, overworked individuals struggling with outdated software and shifting KPIs. We are ‘Visionaries.’ We are ‘Change Agents.’

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The Weight of the Actual

If we wanted to actually do strategy, we wouldn’t go to a hotel. We would go to the place where the work happens. We would stand on the floor-the literal floor-and look at the gaps. We would bring in someone like Drew H. to point out where the ‘head entrapment zones’ are in our workflows. We would look at the 13 steps it takes to get an invoice approved and ask why 7 of them involve a person who doesn’t even work here anymore. We would stop looking at the blue sky and start looking at our feet.

There is a certain dignity in the mundane. There is a deep, soul-level satisfaction in solving a problem that stays solved. When you fix a floor, it stays fixed. When you secure a playground swing, it stays secure for 433 more uses. But when you ‘align on a vision,’ it starts to drift the moment the first person gets into their car to drive home.

As the facilitator claps her hands to signal the end of the break, I feel a strange sense of clarity. The loss of my photos, the inspector’s eye for failure, the peeling sticky note-it all points to the same truth. We are obsessed with the temporary and terrified of the permanent. We spend our lives building ‘Blue Sky’ castles because we’re afraid to find out if the foundation we’re standing on can actually hold the weight of our dreams. I stand up, grab a 3rd cup of coffee, and prepare to spend the next 83 minutes discussing ‘The Future of Excellence,’ while knowing exactly how the floor feels beneath my shoes. It’s solid. It’s there. It’s the only thing that’s actually holding us up.