Your Brilliant Strategy Is Moving Too Slowly to Matter

The $2.3 trillion cost of treating strategy like a waterfall project when your market moves at platform speed

‍You know the feeling.

That moment when you realize your brilliant strategy—the one that looked so clean in the deck, so logical in the roadmap, is moving too slow to matter. Your market is shifting. Competitors are shipping. And you’re still in planning mode.

Think about how we build software today. We develop in sprints. We test constantly. We ship versions without all the features, knowing they can come later. We learn fast and refine. We work in parallel. Teams are distributed, collaborative, and quick to adapt.

Agile, design thinking, human-centered design—these aren’t just methodologies. They’re cultures of momentum.

So why, when it comes to strategy—how we align as a business, understand our audiences, position our services, go to market, and articulate what makes us unique—do we revert to 1998?

Why do we still manage Story like it’s a waterfall project that needs to be perfect before it ships?

We act like introducing frameworks and LLMs into a process modernizes it. But if we’re still using slow, sequential, siloed behaviors to get to clarity, we’re not transforming. We’re just decorating the waterfall.

When Urgency Becomes Theater

Here’s what I see, again and again: A client reaches out about a massive, complex problem—something that threatens market position, internal alignment, competitive advantage. The kind of challenge that doesn’t have an obvious answer.

“We need to solve this,” they say. “But we're going to handle it with internal resources first. Our team needs time to figure things out before we bring you in.”

A year later, they call back. Same problem. Same urgency. But now there’s more market pressure, higher stakes, and a lot less patience. And when we finally dig in? There’s almost no documented progress that can actually be applied to transformation.

The year wasn’t spent solving. It was spent looking like they were solving.

Urgency looks productive. Teams scramble, they meet, they document and plan—often with intensity and focus that gives the appearance of real progress. But the moment alignment is required—across functions, up and down leadership, across disciplines—the motion grinds down.

The numbers reveal what a massive sink this is:

McKinsey & Company found that Fortune 500 managers spend 37% of their time making decisions, with more than half of that time spent ineffectively—translating to over 530,000 days of lost working time and roughly $250 million of wasted labor costs per year per company.

Suddenly the urgency gives way to inertia. Not because the problem isn’t important, but because now it’s political. Now it’s cross-functional. Now it threatens to uncover just how unclear things really are.

Sales teams experience a 25% reduction in the chance of closing a deal when decision approvals are delayed by more than 48 hours, according to Harvard Business Review. Yet people wait for the perfect conditions before building. They want all the questions answered, all the stakeholders aligned, and all the variables mapped.

That moment never comes.

The Story Debt Problem

Here’s what I've learned after 20 years of being called in when it’s almost too late:

Story doesn’t have an operating system.

You have shared drives, decks, PDFs, OKRs, KPIs—but none of it connects to how you manage meaning. If code has Git, what does your Story have?

Most organizations have no version control for their narrative. No alignment score. No way to test messaging in real time. No system of governance for clarity.

That’s why alignment fails quietly and expensively. Story Debt accumulates when your business evolution outpaces your narrative evolution—when marketing tells one version of your value, product teams another, sales yet another, and leadership speaks in abstractions that connect to none of them. The result: internal fragmentation that kills belief before it can drive results.

You wouldn’t tolerate technical debt like that in your product. But you normalize it in Story all the time.

The consequence? 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. Why? Because transformations fail:

• When they lack narrative coherence
• When teams work from different assumptions about what success looks like
• When Story Debt creates misalignment that undermines even the best strategic initiatives

This translates to massive global waste: $2.3 trillion spent on failed digital transformation programs, with more than 70% failing to deliver positive results.‍

The Human Reality

This is where the real politics take hold, and I mean the full spectrum of internal risk aversion that paralyzes progress, such as people fearing for job safety, teams worried about looking good to senior leadership, cross-functional territorial battles over who owns the narrative, and the fear of being wrong publicly, causing decisions to get delayed indefinitely.

Good leaders want to trust their teams. And they should. But they’re also accountable. For outcomes. For optics. For results that cascade up and ripple outward.

So they wait. Or they hesitate. Or they hope alignment will self-generate. But trust without structure drifts. Structure without momentum stalls.

I’ve worked with leaders who tried to solve these massive internal problems on their own for six months, a year, sometimes longer. Then they reach a breaking point. They’re out of time, out of patience, and quietly worried that if they don’t solve it soon, it might cost them more than just the project.

As one client told me:
“If you get fired, you have other clients. If I get fired, I have to start over.”

That’s the real tension: You want to empower your team. But you’re afraid the output won’t reflect your intent. And sometimes, you don’t even know where to start. The chaos feels too complex to hand off.

The Missing Operating System

Here’s what drives me crazy: every other critical business function has systematic accountability.

If your DevOps team managed infrastructure without version control, your CTO would intervene immediately. If your finance team tracked revenue in spreadsheets without integrated systems, your CFO would demand solutions. If your sales team operated without CRM infrastructure, your board would ask hard questions.

But Story? We treat it like a creative project that will magically align itself.

The result is predictable: while your team’s perfecting the deck, competitors are shipping narrative, capturing mind-share, and defining categories.

What Would It Look Like if Story Had an Operating System?
‍
It would include:
‍
• Shared narrative version control - Track changes to positioning over time, prevent conflicting updates
• Modular language libraries - Role-specific messaging that stays aligned to core Story
• Cross-functional alignment scoring - Automated consistency checking across teams
• Real-time integration - Connected to product roadmaps, comms calendars, and strategic briefs
• Prototyping environments - Test messages, decks, and positioning before they ship

That system doesn’t exist in most companies. But it could.

Because Story (yes, with a capital S) is not a final artifact. It’s a working draft. A shared operating asset:

• Built in sprints
• Activated in parallel
• Tested across teams
• Evolved in context

Story is not a slide. It’s a system.

Stop Waiting. Start Building.
‍
So please. Think about what I'm saying.

Ask yourself: How much of this is going on inside your organization? What can you do about it? How can you get ahead of it—or go around it?

You don’t need to wait. You don’t need to figure everything out first. What you do need is motion. Friction. A pressure-tested prototype.

You can keep editing the deck. Or you can start building the infrastructure your business actually needs: a living, evolving Story that aligns your people, your narrative, and your market.

First Person has specialized in Story at the Center™ methodology for over two decades—treating Story and strategy as unified business infrastructure rather than separate functions. We’ve helped create billions in value, made transformative technologies inevitable to markets, and guided the birth of world-changing categories by creating the belief that drives adoption.

The question isn’t whether your strategy is brilliant. The question is: Are you moving fast enough for it to matter?