Two people walk into a room.
One has a beautiful poster of Bangladesh on their wall. They can tell you about the beaches, the temples, the food. They’ve read the articles. Watched the documentaries. Built a whole vision board around it.
The other person doesn’t have a poster. But they spent a month there.
Who do you want to talk to?
This is the divide I keep seeing in organizations right now. And it’s getting wider.
Companies are drowning in posters. Roadmaps that describe destinations nobody’s visited. Dashboards that measure motion nobody’s felt. Status reports that document plans nobody’s executed. PowerPoints that pitch futures nobody’s building toward.
And here’s the thing. The people making those posters aren’t lazy or incompetent. They’re stuck in a mode that used to make sense. When the cost of doing was high, planning was the responsible move. You couldn’t afford to just go. So you studied, modeled, projected, and presented your way toward a decision.
That math has changed.
The cost of doing has collapsed. AI, modern tooling, the speed at which you can prototype, test, and learn. All of it has made the gap between “thinking about it” and “trying it” almost negligible. And yet most organizations are still optimizing for the poster.
I was talking with a colleague recently about a company we’re working with. Smart people. Decades of institutional knowledge. But their entire culture runs on one person knowing something, telling another person, and hoping it sticks. No system. No structure for turning action into shared knowledge. Just tribal memory held together by tenure.
And the instinct when you see that? Build a framework. Create a roadmap. Make a poster.
But what actually moves the needle is smaller than that. It’s doing something. Documenting what happened, not what you plan to do. And then telling the story of what you learned so others can build on it.
Work doesn’t get documented anymore. It gets encoded. Through doing. Through building. Through the artifacts that come out the other side.
There’s a trap right now that I think a lot of leaders are falling into. They’re worried about the technology. Which AI tool, which integration, which platform. They’re spending hours figuring out how to connect the plumbing when they haven’t turned the water on yet.
I caught myself doing this recently. I was deep into trying to get two tools to sync perfectly. And then I stopped and asked myself: would it make a substantial difference if I just used what I have and skipped the optimization? The answer was no. So I moved on. And you know what? The tool I was trying to force into my workflow will probably be irrelevant in three months anyway.
The smartest move with AI right now isn’t figuring it out. It’s applying it. Getting something done. Seeing what works. Adjusting. That’s the passport. The poster is another integration diagram nobody asked for.
My partner Chris said something this week that stuck with me. He said the real skill gap isn’t in making anymore. Everyone can make things now. The gap is in the combination of making AND telling. Doing the work and then knowing how to put it out there in a way that resonates.
He’s right. I see it constantly. Talented people who build incredible things and then sit around waiting for someone to ask them about it. They went to Bangladesh but never told anyone.
And on the other side, people who tell great stories about places they’ve never been.
The ones who win are the ones who go, come back, and say: “The food wasn’t what I expected. The temple was twice as big as the photos. And here’s what I’d do differently next time.” That’s a story people lean into. That’s lived experience. That’s credibility you can’t fake with a poster.
I think about this a lot in the context of how we help organizations. The instinct is always to start with the framework. The model. The strategy deck. And those things have a place. But increasingly, the most valuable thing we can do is help people take the first step, learn something real, and then build the structure around what actually happened.
Go to Bangladesh. Come back with stories. Burn the poster.
What’s your version of the poster you keep looking at instead of booking the flight?