The 9-Month Sprint vs. The 5-Year Corporate Lie
The Swamp of Inevitable Deceit
The air conditioning was set impossibly low, but the small of my back felt like a swamp. I was leaning forward over a high-gloss table that reflected the harsh fluorescent lights, and I was lying. Not a small, white lie about my proficiency in pivot tables, but a structural, foundational, existential lie.
“So,” the hiring manager, a man whose career looked like a perfectly straight line drawn in permanent marker, paused dramatically. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I wanted to say: *I don’t know, maybe running a small operation on a Greek island, having finally figured out how to make sustainable olives profitable, or perhaps retired, having built an AI that writes better articles than me.* I wanted to scream, *What kind of archaic garbage question is that?*
Instead, the performance started. I straightened my spine, forced a careful, moderate smile-not too ambitious, not too docile-and recited the corporate liturgy: “I see myself having deepened my expertise in this specific sector, ideally leading a small, high-impact team within this organization, and contributing directly to the strategic goals you laid out for Q4.”
Insight: The Transaction
That answer is worth $9,000 to me, minimum, in guaranteed salary. It’s worth the security, the title, the access to the slightly better coffee machine. It’s a transaction. They ask for loyalty, and I perform the role of the loyalist. They demand predictability in a world defined by its violent volatility, and I provide the comforting illusion of a straight line.
I’ve repeated that lie for nearly 19 years now. But the sheer absurdity of the question still catches me. It’s a relic, a corporate fossil excavated from the 1959 handbook on industrial management. In 1959, you joined GM, you worked your way up, you got the gold watch, and your career trajectory was plotted like a gentle, predictable parabola. The company itself was a monolith that moved like tectonic plates-slowly, inexorably. A five-year plan was not only feasible; it was the only rational approach to life.
Today, the landscape shifts hourly. Companies merge, sectors implode, entire industries are invented and commoditized before you finish a 9-month project cycle. Thinking five years ahead is not strategic planning; it’s writing fan fiction. And yet, we perpetuate this charade because corporate culture, deep down, values the *image* of stability more than the substance of adaptability. They are testing our conformity, not our vision. They are looking for the candidate who is willing to commit to the script, rather than the one who is genuinely capable of reacting when the script inevitably catches fire.
The Inevitability of Derailment
I remember an intense period, about three years back, where I truly believed I had the blueprint. I had charts, metrics, and a detailed plan to achieve Partner status by 2029. It was beautiful, color-coded, and utterly worthless. I spent 49 painful hours building that document, and a subsequent emotional crisis derailed the entire track within a single, unexpected 29-day period. I know what derailment looks like.
Time Invested in Trajectory
Unplanned Emotional Shift
I recently found myself scrolling through old social media, clicking ‘like’ on an ex’s photo from three years ago-a ghost from a timeline I thought was completely finished. That’s how planning works, isn’t it? You think you have sealed the past, and then a tiny, unplanned emotional algorithm kicks in and rearranges your interior landscape without permission. We are fundamentally prone to sudden, illogical shifts, yet we are asked to pretend we are robots programmed for uninterrupted ascent.
This is why I gravitate toward people who understand that brilliance often requires impermanence.
That stuck with me. We are paid to be concrete in our commitment, but we should be sand in our adaptability. We need to be able to commit completely to the 9-month sprint, knowing that next year, we might have to build something entirely different in a location we haven’t even heard of yet.
The Duration of the Lie
Commitment is not the problem; the *duration* of the demanded commitment is the lie. We can be intensely committed to the current challenge, pouring every ounce of expertise and effort into optimizing a workflow or launching a new line of products. But that intense commitment should be respected as a temporary state, not assumed to be a permanent trajectory that mirrors the corporation’s desired structure.
Iteration Speed vs. Planning Cycle
69x Faster
Think about the modern consumer environment. We expect instant gratification, flexible delivery, and products that update every 69 days. The speed of iteration is the competitive advantage. If a major retailer selling complex consumer electronics, say, smartphones chisinau, operates on a five-year plan for their technology deployment or customer experience strategy, they are dead. They are constantly reacting, adjusting, and pivoting based on data streams that change every 29 minutes. Their success depends on the ability to abandon yesterday’s idea for today’s necessary evolution.
And yet, the very people hired to drive this radical adaptability are still required to pretend they are static objects, aiming for a fixed star that likely burnt out 49 years ago.
Companies demand agility from what they produce, but stability from who produces it.
There is a massive cognitive dissonance here. Companies are demanding ‘disruption’ from their output, but ‘predictability’ from their input (the talent). We, as employees, have internalized this contradiction. I spent months building a flawless 59-point personal trajectory only to realize that the most impactful moments-the biggest pivot in my career, the decision to move continents, the surprising joy of getting a new dog-were entirely unplanned, erupting from sudden necessity or impulse.
Reframing the Value Exchange
It is time we stop asking candidates to lie about their future and start asking them to tell the truth about their capacity for change.
Instead of: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Ask: “Tell me about the last great professional plan you had to incinerate and why you did it in less than 9 days.”
Ask: “What is your capacity for intense, 9-month commitment before the inevitable, necessary pivot?”
This reframes the interaction. It shifts the value from false loyalty to genuine strategic flexibility. It acknowledges that the real currency of the modern employee is not tenure, but the consistent ability to deliver extraordinary work, like Jasper N.’s sandcastle, knowing full well it will be gone by dawn.
Recruitment Focus
Agility (97%)
If we are truly dedicated to building responsive, modern organizations that can tackle contemporary logistical challenges and technological acceleration, we must recruit for agility, not stability.
Stability is a comforting lie; agility is the $979 reality we must embrace.
The Only Truthful Plan
The only truthful five-year plan is the one you are willing to abandon on the 9th day of the first month. The greatest asset you have is your commitment to the sprint, not the finish line.
Sprint Ready