Here's why your company may not have a strategy. Strategy = clarity, and clarity can be one of the most unsettling and existential things someone can have.

Apply this to your personal life.

How often do we make up stories and get pulled into the latest drama because the prospect of clarity is deeply unsettling? Clarity is when we see our challenges for what they are and our prospects for success (and risks for failure) for what they are. We must take a leap of faith on a way forward, and face the cold, harsh fact that there's a good chance it will fail.

"I have to leave. This relationship is over."

"I have to drop out and try ________"

"This just isn't working. I can't keep juggling _____ and ______."

Everyone says they want their company to have a strategy. But when you discuss the real challenges ahead, people say, "No, not that!"

What they want is certainty. They want someone to take responsibility (someone else) for making a decision that cracks open their impasse, to make their work easier. What they want is to have less on their plate. They want someone to take responsibility for having the answers.

In a sense, they want the benefits of a strategy without actually having to sit in the shoes of the person making those hard decisions.

Brandon Dorn shared with me this great reflection and quote from TS Elliott

"Basically, longing for a perfect strategy is just another "just" for managing complexity and uncertainty, when what's really needed is continual attentiveness to it and negotiation with it.

It brought to mind a line from T.S. Eliot in a verse play called "The Rock," where he writes... "

“They constantly try to escape /

From the darkness outside and within /

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. /

But the man that is will shadow /

The man that pretends to be.”

I read him as saying that systems can never replace virtue, that no matter how hard we work to build processes and structures that ensure good outcomes, we'll always rely on the judgment, intuition, vision of the people inside of them.