The launch was announced with great pomp as a “historic moment,” accompanied by banners, swelling music, and a mandatory Townhall full of flowery and leafy metaphors.
SHOTE no longer had a strategy — it was a strategy.
A Living Strategy™: self-updating, mood-sensitive, and “resonant with our collective vibrations.”

Dashboards appeared overnight, glowing with colours that nobody understood. A yellow line flickered in the corner; Johnny explained it was “a transitional mood between optimism and transformation.”

Then came Little Johnny’s decree:

“Henceforth, in the spirit of collective awakening and organisational renewal, all teams must graciously and enthusiastically undergo The Process™. The Process™ is continuous, reflective, and never to be reduced to mere tasks. To truly know the Process™ is to become the Process™.”

What The Process™ actually meant was left deliberately murky. A few believed it involved workshops; some suspected new software; most guessed it meant endless PowerPoints.

Meanwhile, reality continued its rude interruptions. Urgent problems were quietly set aside as teams were herded into workshops and exercises, leaving little time to treat them properly:

• A cholera outbreak response lagged for weeks — rebranded as a “Community-Led Learning Journey.”
• Salaries in West Africa were delayed for months — reframed as “volunteer-driven solidarity.”
• Warehouse stock-outs in East Africa dragged on — presented as “evidence of lean supply-chain innovation.”
• A security evacuation in Afghanistan went unanswered for days — marked in the dashboard as “Adaptive Agility.”

Ald scribbled grimly in his notebook: “Workshops sprout like weeds, and meanwhile cholera waits for no flipchart.”

None of these practicalities reached resolution. They simply dissolved into the mist of Vision Feedback Loops™—closed cycles where concerns entered as urgent pleas and re-emerged as abstract lessons learned, feeding only themselves.

In the corridors, people muttered, their voices carrying the low bleating of a confused flock:

“Didn’t we do this exact thing three years ago?”
“With the same posters, only blue instead of green?”
“Yes, but this time the colours live.”

And thus, at Management’s request, the first Committees of Questions™ began forming, tasked with organising the reception of concerns that would later be read aloud in weekly Q&A sessions. Their mandate: to collect concerns for the weekly Q&A sessions. Questions were diligently recorded, numbered, and filed in neat binders. Answers were promised, but apart from a few more leafy metaphors, they never materialised. The ritual became one of asking without hope — a carefully managed theatre of dissatisfaction and further confusion.

At the very peak of this performance, Johnny announced he would be away for four months on a Global Strategic Immersion Fellowship™, “to witness strategy embodiment across geographies.”

Translation: a long absence at precisely the moment his creation began to collapse under its own weight.

Ald Firt, wedged in his stairwell office, poured a long draught of schnapps and noted:
“When the shepherd leaves mid-storm to study clouds, expect the sheep to eat each other. And the committees will bleat minutes about it.””