It didn’t start on Monday; it leaked in sideways from last week, from last month, from that meeting nobody concluded and everyone pretended was “captured in notes.” Remote week, same fog. Coffee that smells burnt even over Zoom, a cup ring on my desk shaped like a small continent. Slack pings like fruit flies. A fridge post-it losing its stick again, curling like it’s tired of being a reminder. VWCG tools up in a browser tab I keep closing and reopening for no reason, like a nervous tick. Robot. Target. DNA. Gear. Four icons that look too simple to matter and somehow matter more than the slide deck I didn’t open.
This wasn’t strategy. Or it was. Depends who you ask and when. In remote land, strategy dies in decks because nobody reads past slide seven, and it lives in rhythms because the calendar is the only thing with a spine. “Cadence beats heroics,” someone typed in a DM, sounding smug and also right. The OS is light—too light to carry you if you lean, sharp enough to sting when you pretend it isn’t there. We run it. We forget it. The drift grows mildew along the baseboards of our week; we notice; we remember; we run it again.
Baseline first. Q-0, even though it’s Wednesday because Monday dissolved in emails and Tuesday was eaten by a release that slipped. The AI Readiness Assessment lands like lab work you didn’t fast for. Red in the usual organs: governance, data, the part of “strategy” we like to draw but not fund. “Later” gets typed in chat, the laziest promise. Later is a liar. I screenshot the results and pin them to the channel; somebody tries to change the topic back to a joke; I change it again. The little hands fight over the same switch. Tape stronger than optimism.
We try to skip Vision Canvas because it feels like performative honesty. Blank boxes waiting for buzzwords. We fill them anyway: innovation, excellence, customer-first, donut emojis for morale. The youngest voice (not an intern, just the only one brave enough to be literal) types, “we don’t do that.” Cameras flicker off for “bandwidth,” which is how remote teams say “I need thirty seconds to pretend I didn’t hear that.” Backspace. Backspace. The canvas gets emptier and heavier at the same time. I stare at the empty boxes like they’re judgmental windows. On the drive to my kitchen I pass the fridge; the post-it falls again; I don’t pick it up. Maybe clarity feels less like illumination and more like embarrassment with better lighting.
SOP spine. Remote teams say they love docs until they have to write one. The SOP Taxonomy is boring and therefore perfect. It forces the sprawl to stand still long enough to name it: onboarding in six dialects, refunds that depend on which agent woke up on the right side of the bed, security steps nobody can find unless they know the exact filename with the forgotten underscore. The SOP Creation Wizardspits out a process so plain it’s almost rude. Plain is mercy. We argue for three minutes, then five, then someone shares screen and edits in real time and the argument melts into a cursor. Publish. A link with an owner and a review date. The SOP Management Wizard takes the baby doc and gives it shoes and an ID card. Versioning. Checkpoints. The dull sound of order taking a seat.
Noise everywhere. A chair squeaks in someone’s home office every fifteen seconds like it’s on a timer. A dog barks and then apologizes (the human does, the dog doubles down). A printer blinks a red triangle in the corner of a shared frame; nobody knows which button clears it; we all pretend we don’t see. My internet drops for a beat; I rejoin; faces have rearranged; my own voice repeats in the recording like an echo with stage fright. In the chat, three threads argue about whether “roadmap” is one word. One person writes ROADMÁP just to be annoying. I mute, unmute, mute again. Strategy lives in this noise, or dies here; I can’t tell which, and maybe that’s the point.
Leadership week arrives without permission. The Leadership DNA Radar is a wheel of unwelcome compliments. Weak empathy. Delegation wobbling. Listening brittle. I laugh too loud in the wrong place and someone mutes by accident and we all pretend not to notice. The Business Emotional Intelligence page loads; the scores are honest in exactly the way I don’t prefer. “Therapy time,” someone types; the laughing emoji doesn’t land because laughter typed isn’t laughter felt. We fold our pride into our pockets where the lint is. Later I see a printout behind a teammate on camera, half hidden under a plant. We hide the mirror and leave it in frame anyway.
Pizza boxes don’t exist on Zoom so the SWOT Analysis Tool becomes a chaotic doc where five cursors collide. Strengths: half a line, because bragging with six faces staring feels like shoplifting. Weaknesses run long and diagonally, because one person types while pacing and their laptop wobbles. Opportunities smear when someone pastes links that break the formatting. Threats pile up in ALL CAPS because the person typing there forgot how to release the Shift key or chose not to. It would be funny if it weren’t also our budget next quarter. Then the 90-Day Scaling Roadmap swims into view. Names in ink, not pencil. Owners who flinch and then don’t. Someone writes “TBD” and we delete it because TBD is a ghost costume for “I hope someone else does it.”
Operating reviews are scheduled as 60 minutes; we swear to end at 45; we land at 62 because someone always explains an old decision like it’s new. Still, the structure holds better than the vibe: delta slides only, a fog-buster metric up front (single number, not an essay), one live SOP demo (no screenshots, show the thing in production), and a decision to kill or double-down. The kill list sounds vicious; entropy is worse. Projects don’t die cleanly; they rot in shared drives while we admire their logos. Better to bury than to pretend. We tape a tiny RACI next to the roadmap; the tape curls at the corners; someone fixes it; someone else fixes the fix; it stays crooked and somehow that feels honest.
KPIs stalk the edge of the quarter like weather forecasts. Idea-to-shipped time cut in half. ≥80% initiatives tied to actual pillars, not pet projects hiding under borrowed nouns. Audit hiccups down. Turnover down (the kind people talk about in 1:1s, not just the number HR tracks). Margin pointing up without magic. Automation hours counted without cheating. Risks down, or at least written like we mean it. On slides, these look simple. In lived time they look like maybes. People still resign. Audits still sting. Margins smirk. Without targets the drift wins; with targets the drift fights you; pick your pain and set a recurring calendar invite for it.
Risks get pinned where nobody can claim “I missed the doc”: tool theater (forms filled, nothing changed), leader defensiveness (Radar/EI hits a nerve and the nerve files a rebuttal), roadmap bloat (initiatives multiply like rabbits in a garden we pretend is fenced), and entropy (unpaid rent compounding). Antidotes stand next to them, same font, no inspiration quotes: one live SOP win every month (show it working in the wild, not in a demo sandbox), one behavior contract per leader (public, small, practiced; no five-point sermons), seven initiatives max (add one, kill one), and a quarterly archive of things we willingly let die. Quiet trophies. Proof we mean it.
Does it work? Depends on your definition of “work.” If you need applause, no. If you need drift to slow so decisions can catch up, kind of. If you need honesty that bruises first and pays later, yes. Ask me again and I’ll answer the opposite because contradiction keeps sitting in the chair next to me, legs uneven, cup leaving a ring on the desk, tapping a laptop that throws a single-line error we’ve all decided is decorative. That error blinked all week; nobody fixed it; everyone saw it. Feelings behave like that too.
Non-linear week, non-linear brain. I keep jumping to small things: the squeak that got louder as the day went on, the way someone’s hoodie string bounced when they talked with their hands, the Slack thread about the comma before “and,” the printer’s red triangle pulsing in a coworker’s background like a heartbeat nobody wants to acknowledge. Strategy lives there too, in texture, in nonsense. Slides erase texture; cadence includes it. The OS isn’t an answer; it’s a metronome. You still have to play.
We tried to cheat once: skipped the baseline, leapt straight to roadmap with noble certainty. The week collapsed like a camping chair with a missing pin. We went back, sheepish, to readiness, to taxonomy, to the plain words that don’t argue. We wrote one SOP that mattered (refunds) and one that felt like overkill (meeting handoffs) and the second one saved twenty minutes a day across twelve people and that math is the kind of ROI nobody claps for and everybody benefits from in silence. Quiet is where survival hides.
Governance, light version: one OS owner who acts like a librarian with a whistle. Artifact shelf with labels: Vision (current, not aspirational), Readiness (dated, not “evergreen”), SOP index (owners, last review), Roadmaps (this quarter, not “someday”), Retro notes (ugly truth, protected). Budgets tied to milestone health, not narrative charm. Money doesn’t argue; it routes. You can’t sweet-talk it; you can only ship.
Ask me what changed and I’ll tell you nothing changed. Ask me again in the next paragraph and I’ll say everything changed, and neither answer is a lie. Monday we had slogans and velocity theater. Friday we had audit history and a roadmap with names and a kill list with line items we didn’t flinch while deleting. Between those points: bruised egos, quiet apologies in DMs, two separate “my bad” comments that never used those words, a leadership wheel someone printed and folded into quarters like a secret map. We didn’t become different people. We became slightly more honest ones. Or we didn’t. Or we did. Both.
I keep thinking about the plant on my desk that didn’t ask for burnt coffee and got it anyway. It survived. It didn’t clap. The fridge post-it is still on the floor, edges curled like a shrug. The chair squeaks in the same rhythm as the clock app’s second hand, and I can’t tell whether it’s mocking me or keeping time. The printer error light in someone’s background turned into a running joke that stopped being funny and then became useful because the joke made the error visible and the visibility finally made someone fix it. Or not yet. I haven’t asked. Maybe that’s tomorrow’s rhythm.
So did we get better? We did and we didn’t. We moved; we stayed; we drew a box and called it a pillar and then drew a line from a project to the pillar and for the first time in a while the line felt like something other than a lie. We fixed it; we broke it; we fixed what we broke; we kept count; we forgot; we remembered; we kept going. The fog did not lift. It moved to a different corner of the room and pretended to be furniture. We saw it anyway. We waved, ridiculous. We kept working, more beat than inspiration, more metronome than anthem, and somehow that felt like relief.
Coffee again. Bitter, colder. The calendar invites stacked like dominoes. The VWCG tab still open, the icons still smug, the OS still thin and sharp and enough if we actually run it. I think we did. I think we will forget. I think we’ll remember when the mildew shows up. Both true; both false; both the only way I know to keep time when the song refuses to start.
