I am sitting in a boardroom (not ours, thankfully) that smells faintly of ozone, dry cleaning chemicals, stale coffee and the distinct sweat of mildly panicked management, staring at a slide titled “Strategic Horizons 2030.” It is a beautiful slide, really, full of ascending arrows and comforting shades of corporate blue that suggest the future is just a slightly more profitable version of the CMO’s wet dream. Everyone around the table is nodding with the rhythmic precision of those plastic drinking birds you used to see on Palo Alto office desks in the nineties, finding deep, existential comfort in the linearity of it all. They love the illusion of control, of the no-change, the status quo.
Everyone is calm, soothed by the idea that corporate time is a well-behaved corridor instead of a drunk goat on a mountainside. Pens tap. Someone says “alignment” with the same reverence monks reserve for candles. My body reacts the way it does when turbulence hits without warning, a full internal brace for impact. I am not anxious about being wrong (I often am), I am allergic to pretending the world is stable just because the slide deck is. My brain is screaming. It is not screaming because the data is wrong, though the data is almost certainly cooked up by an intern using an off-the shelve Chinese AI agent that hallucinated half the sources. It is screaming because my particular neurological wiring – the kind that treats linear projections the same way a cat treats a vacuum cleaner– sees the invisible disaster lurking in the white space. While they see a roadmap to 2027 success, I see a plethora of probable collisions, three distinct technological singularities, and an interesting geopolitical crisis involving rare earth metals that they haven’t budgeted for.
I still see way too often strategy treated like Gothic architecture, obsessing over the foundations of a church we intended to live in for decades. We are actually at sea in a 12 Beaufort gale. They spend millions hiring consultants from McKinsey -those expensive people in sharp suits who borrow your watch to tell you the time- to build these basilicas of sole, pure linear logic.
But logic is brittle. Logic snaps when a pandemic hits, or an orange dictator gets twitchy, or a teenager in a basement codes a piece of software that makes your entire business model obsolete by lunchtime. This is where the friction happens. The corporate immune system is designed to hunt down and kill uncertainty, replacing it with the placebo of “Key Performance Indicators”. It does not compute for Jef Staes’ “Red Monkey“, that radical, disruptive idea that the organizational antibodies immediately try to slaughter. But when you filter out uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, you also -and mostly- filter out reality. You end up with a sterile, hermetically sealed plan that works perfectly right up until the moment it touches the actual world. To paraphrase Mike Tyson (or Jake Paul 😊), everyone has a plan until reality punches them in the face.
This brings us to the uncomfortable necessity of “Neuroelasticity.” It’s not a made-up word (I’m not Donald J Trump), but I need you to take it seriously. Neuroelasticity is the strategic ability to stretch your thinking around a corner without snapping a synapse. It mirrors the brain’s neuroplasticity. It is the distinct refusal to settle for the comfortable answer or the consensus view. Most organizations are (luckily) staffed by “linear thinkers”… brilliant, capable people who are excellent at executing a plan once the tracks are laid down. But when the tracks run off a cliff, the Linear Thinker keeps driving the train because the schedule says so. The neuroelastic brain, often the “different brain”, the one labeled distracted, difficult, or weird, realizes the tracks are gone and is already looking for a parachute or a boat.
We are pattern hunters. We are the ones who read a sci-fi novel in 1994 that predicted exactly this supply chain collapse, and we are the ones not surprised that the world is currently on fire. Because we read Bruce Sterlings book. And we plot 42 possibilities of plausible futures. We are the weirdos who are currently obsessing over the structural integrity of the future itself… we can’t help it.
The problem is that most leaders claim they want “outside of the box” thinking, but the moment you actually give it to them, they panic. They want the aesthetic of innovation without the terrifying vertigo of actually changing their minds. Real contrarian thinking feels like an insult to the status quo because it is. It points out that the Emperor isn’t just naked; he is also freezing his balls off and standing in the wrong room. If you look around your strategy table and everyone agrees on the trajectory for the next three years, you are not in a strategy meeting; you are in a suicide pact. You need the friction. You need the person who asks the question that makes everyone shift uncomfortably in their Herman Miller chairs. Me.
So keep your shiny decks and your ascending arrows if they help you sleep at night. Just don’t be surprised when the world takes a sharp left turn and the only people not vomiting in the passenger seat are the ones you labeled “disruptive” in their last performance review.
Pray we’re not your competitor’s secret weapon. Imagine.
