The dry-erase marker screeches against the whiteboard at a frequency that makes the fillings in my molars vibrate. It is a sharp, dissonant 1,127 hertz, a sound that signals the death of logic. I am sitting in the corner of this glass-walled fishbowl, ostensibly here to consult on the acoustic dampening of the new executive wing, but really, I am a witness to a crime. My sinuses are screaming. I just sneezed for the seventh time in a row, a violent, rhythmic percussion that should have interrupted the Chief Financial Officer’s flow, but he did not flinch. He is deep in the trance. He is pointing at a line graph that predicts revenue for the fourth quarter of 2037. He looks at me, his eyes glazed with the shimmering fever of a man who believes he has conquered entropy.

We are here to discuss the Five-Year Plan. It is a document currently spanning 47 pages of glossy paper and 117 slides of high-definition delusion. To an acoustic engineer like me, Harper M.K., a room like this is a nightmare. Sound bounces off these hard surfaces, creating standing waves that muddy the truth. You can say something honest at one end of the table, and by the time it reaches the CEO at the other end, the reflections have canceled out the frequency of reality. That is exactly what is happening with this strategy. We are trying to map the acoustics of a stadium that has not been built yet, using a microphone that only records what we want to hear.

I watch as the VP of Strategy adjusts her glasses. She is citing a study that claims a 27 percent increase in consumer confidence by the year 2027. Where do these numbers come from? They are born in the basement of desperation. We spend months in these rooms, locked away from the actual world, forced to predict resource needs for a future that is increasingly erratic. My sneezes have left me slightly lightheaded, which makes the whole scene feel like a dream. I see the reflections of the fluorescent lights on the table-127 individual points of light that represent 127 different ways this plan will fail by the month of July.

The Political Function of Failure

This ritual persists because it serves a political function. If you have a plan, you have a shield. If the plan fails, you do not blame the person; you blame the ‘unforeseen market volatility’ that disrupted the sacred document. It manufactures a false alignment through pure exhaustion. By the time we reach the 37th hour of meetings, everyone agrees to the projections just so they can go home and see their families. We are not building a future; we are building an alibi.

I find myself thinking about the materials I use in my work. Rockwool, foam, fiberglass-these are honest materials. They react to sound waves exactly how physics dictates. They do not pretend to be something they are not. But a five-year plan is a material that claims to be a brick wall while being made entirely of smoke.

In the world of high-stakes environments, such as professional sports or the digital arenas found at ufadaddy, there is a fundamental understanding that the situation on the ground changes every 7 seconds. You cannot place a bet on a match or a game and then refuse to look at the scoreboard for five years. You react. You pivot. You feel the vibration of the moment and adjust your stance. Why, then, do we expect a multibillion-dollar corporation to operate with less agility than a casual gamer? The dissonance is staggering.

I remember a project I worked on for a concert hall in 2017. The architects had a plan. It was a beautiful, rigid plan. They knew exactly where every bolt would go. But when the structure was halfway finished, they discovered a subterranean vein of limestone that changed the entire ground resonance. The plan was obsolete. Instead of clinging to the original blueprints, we had to stop and listen to the earth. We had to change the tension of the support cables by 17 percent. We saved the building because we were willing to admit the plan was a ghost. The corporate world lacks this humility. They see the limestone vein and try to ignore it because the PowerPoint has already been printed.

My head still throbs from the sneezing fit. It feels like my brain is trying to vibrate at 77 different speeds at once. The CFO is now talking about ‘synergistic scaling.’ I want to stand up and tell him that his voice is hitting a resonance frequency with the glass wall behind him, and if he continues at this pitch, the whole room might shatter. It would be a poetic end to the meeting. The shattering of the glass, the sudden intrusion of the outside wind, the cold realization that the world does not care about our fiscal targets.

There is a peculiar comfort in the fake certainty. Humans hate the void. We would rather have a wrong map than no map at all. But a wrong map leads you off a cliff, whereas no map forces you to look at the stars. I have seen 47 different companies go through this exact November ritual. They spend $777,000 on consultants who tell them exactly what they want to hear, packaged in a way that looks like innovation. It is the same melody, just played in a different key. They are looking for a symphony, but they are creating noise.

As an acoustic engineer, I know that the most important part of any soundscape is the silence between the notes. That is where the meaning lives. In a strategic plan, the ‘silence’ is the space for the unknown. It is the acknowledgement that we do not know what the world will look like in 27 months. A truly brave plan would be three pages long and consist mostly of questions. But you cannot present three pages of questions to a board of directors. They want the 47-page lie.

I start to pack up my decibel meter. My work here is done, though no one has noticed. The meeting will continue for another 137 minutes. They will debate the merits of a 7 percent margin increase vs. a 9 percent increase, as if they have that kind of granular control over the chaotic soup of human behavior. I walk toward the door, my footsteps echoing against the polished concrete. The reverb time is approximately 2.7 seconds-too long for clear speech. Everyone in that room is talking over each other’s echoes, hearing only the distorted versions of their own thoughts.