The Machine That Lies to You
Strategy development has become the most sophisticated self-deception apparatus in corporate life.
The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid. - Richard Bach
Bach was writing about individuals. The argument is particularly poignant when applied to organisations. Organisations tell themselves lies for the same reasons people do, and they have built industrial machinery to do it reliably, on a schedule, with a budget line and a deliverable.
The machinery is called strategy development. It is the most sophisticated self-deception apparatus in corporate life, and it runs so smoothly that nobody inside it can see what it is actually doing.
How the machine works
If the process produces poor orientation, why does every organisation, regardless of size, keep running it?
Because it was never really about orientation. It is about governance and external projection, and it has been about those things for so long that nobody remembers it was supposed to be about anything else.
Governance is the first audience. Boards need to see that strategy has been done. Audit committees need to review it. Regulators need evidence of thought. These are legitimate demands. The problem is that the process built to satisfy them has been mistaken for the process of orienting the organisation to its environment, and over time, the mistake has stopped being a mistake. The governance ritual has become the strategy. If the document exists, the strategy exists. If it does not, it does not.
External projection is the second. Investors want a narrative they can price. Analysts want a story with measurable pillars. The labour market wants a purpose worth joining. Organisations do need to be legible to the outside world, but legibility to outsiders is not the same as contact with reality. When the strategy is shaped primarily for external consumption, the organisation ends up with a picture of itself that a stranger would find credible, but the people inside know is incomplete.
These two audiences explain almost everything about how the machine behaves. The timeline is fixed because governance works on a calendar. The output is a deck because external projection needs a document. The templates are chosen because boards and investors recognise them. The refresh happens annually because reporting does. The CEO’s preferred framing survives every round of editing because it is the framing the market will hear. None of this is corruption. It is the system doing what it was built to do.
Stafford Beer’s POSIWID puts it plainly. The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of strategy development is to produce governance artefacts and an investor-grade narrative. The rhetoric about navigating complexity and orienting to the future is the cover story the system tells itself, so it does not have to face what it is actually doing.
Why the machine persists
Underneath governance and projection sits something older, which is what Bach was pointing at. Fear.
Leaders are afraid of not knowing, of being wrong in public, of having no answer when the board asks, of looking less coherent than the peer running the same process at the company across the street. The machine produces an answer on schedule, in the right format, in a language the board will accept and the market will price. It discharges the fear. That is the deepest reason it persists, and why it is so difficult to challenge. To question the machine is to propose that leaders sit with the fear instead of outsourcing it to a process, and very few leaders are willing to do that.
So the process runs, the artefact is produced, the board signs it off, the market receives the story, and everyone involved gets to believe that strategy has been done. The fear is managed. The lie is told. The environment, meanwhile, carries on doing what it was always going to do.
What this does to orientation
The harm is not that the machine fails to orient the organisation. The harm is that it actively erodes the capacity to orient.
It does this in three ways.
It trains people to trust the output of the process over the evidence of the environment. Once a strategy has been formally agreed, signals that contradict it become easy to treat as noise, exceptions, or someone’s private concern. The strategy is the official reality. Disagreeing with it puts you at odds with the organisation’s formal position, which is expensive. So people stop saying what they see, and the organisation loses its feedback.
It teaches the organisation that strategic thinking happens at specific moments, in specific rooms, with specific people, on a calendar set by governance. The rest of the time, strategy is something you execute, not something you think about. This is the opposite of what orientation requires. Orientation is continuous. The moment you treat strategic thinking as episodic, you have lost the ability to stay coupled to an environment that will not wait for your next cycle.
It rewards a certain kind of answer. Clean, confident, presentable, defensible in a boardroom and to an analyst. Real orientation is often none of those things. It is partial, provisional, contested. The machine cannot produce that output. Its job is to produce the other kind. So people learn to deliver the other kind, and the organisation loses its tolerance for the real thing.
By the time a strategic shock arrives, the organisation has spent years training itself out of the habits it needs. The document is no help. The machine that produced the document is no help. The people who would have seen the shock coming either learned not to say so or left.
What strategy development could be instead
The alternative is not to abandon governance or to stop talking to the market. Both are legitimate. Both need to be served. The alternative is to stop pretending that serving them is the same thing as orienting the organisation, and to build a practice that actually does the orienting.
That practice looks different. It stays in contact with the operating environment instead of retreating from it. It spends more time where the work happens and less time in off-site venues. It uses methodologies to ask questions rather than to organise answers. It treats disagreement as evidence, not as something to be smoothed. It is continuous, not episodic. It revisits its assumptions when the environment gives it reason to, not when the calendar does.
The governance artefact and the investor narrative can still be produced. They should be. But they are downstream outputs, not the strategy itself. The strategy is the organisation’s actual direction: what it intends, the trajectory it is on, the manoeuvres available to it, the logic behind its choices, and the constraints within which it is operating. That is what the document should capture. Not a Greek villa of pillars and values that flatter the board and reassure the market, but a working account of where the organisation is going, why, and what it is willing to give up to get there. Written at a given moment. Known to be provisional. Treated as something to be tested against the environment, not defended against it.
Back to Bach
The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves because we are afraid. The organisational version of that is not metaphorical. Strategy development is the mechanism through which organisations manage their fear, discharge their governance duties, and project a story to the market, producing, as a by-product, a version of reality they can live with.
The document on the intranet is not the strategy. It is the artefact the machine was built to produce. The real strategy is what the organisation is actually doing, shaped by what it is actually willing to see. The gap between the two is the measure of what the machine is costing you.
You do not close that gap by running the machine again, harder. You build a practice that stays in contact with reality even when reality is uncomfortable. That is slower, less presentable, and harder to defend in a board pack. It is also the only thing that produces orientation worth the name.
