The Comfort of the Wrong Answer
Part 2 of a 4-part series on strategy, hype, and the discipline nobody wants to do.
In Part 1 I argued that most of what passes for strategy is actually motion: reactive moves, aspirational slogans, and outsourced diagnoses that let everyone in the room feel busy without ever doing the uncomfortable work. But that raises a question I didn't fully answer: if bad strategy is so obviously bad, why does it keep winning?
The answer isn't stupidity. The people I work with are super sharp. The answer is comfort. Bad strategy spreads because it feels better in the moment than the alternative. And in almost all aspects of our lives these days, we’re conditioned for "frictionless experiences".
The contagion
Richard Rumelt has a line that I think about constantly: "Bad strategy flourishes because it floats above analysis, logic and choice, held aloft by the hot hope that one can avoid dealing with these tricky fundamentals and the difficulties of mastering them."
He calls it a social contagion, and that framing changes how you see it. Bad strategy doesn't persist because nobody knows better. It persists because it's the path of least organizational resistance. Nobody gets fired for following the trend. Nobody gets questioned for adopting the same playbook as every other company in the category. The consultant who tells you to do what your competitors are doing will always have an easier time in the room than the one who says your competitors are wrong and so are you.
Consensus feels like alignment. Alignment feels like progress. And so bad strategy spreads the same way any comfortable belief spreads: not because it's true, but because agreeing with it is frictionless.
Dead futures
Jasmine Bina wrote something recently that I haven't been able to shake. She argues that we're watching entire branches of the cultural future get pruned in real time. Not because they failed, but because they were never explored. AI has become the singular mythological salvation. Every industry, every investor narrative, every conference keynote converges on the same future. And in the rush to get there, all the other futures (the weirder, less fundable, more human ones) are quietly dying.
This is what happens when an entire ecosystem bets on one answer. It's not that AI is irrelevant. It's that the monoculture around it has made it nearly impossible to ask whether the thing you're building actually needs AI, or whether AI is just a costume the strategy is wearing so it gets funded.
I’ve been seeing this often lately. A founder has a genuine insight about a market problem. Somewhere between the insight and the pitch deck, AI got grafted onto the solution. Not because it was the best approach, but because it was the only story anyone would listen to. The diagnosis got replaced by a trend, and the future got narrowed to the one version investors were already comfortable with.
That's not strategy. That's trend-fitting. And trend-fitting is what you do when you've decided that being legible to the market matters more than being right about the problem.
The sameness trap
Alex Smith at Basic Arts makes a point that cuts deeper than most people want to go: strategy is not about being better at the same thing. It's about being different in a way that creates unique value.
Most companies can't hear this. They end up as a reflection of the mean: same positioning language, same growth loops, same content strategy. When you zoom out, entire categories look like a hall of mirrors. Smith wrote a piece called "There are too many damn businesses", and the title alone is doing most of the diagnostic work. The problem isn't competition. It's that everyone is competing on the same axis. Differentiation-by-effort is dead. The only way out is to find a different game entirely, and that requires the kind of strategic thinking most organizations have already replaced with benchmarking.
Smith calls it systemic fit: the idea that a real strategy isn't a collection of good tactics but a system where every piece reinforces every other piece in a way that's hard to copy because it's hard to even see. Or as Rumelt would say, coherent actions. Building that takes nerve because it means saying no to things that look like opportunities. It means accepting that your competitors will do things you won't. It means making trade-offs that look like losses today because they're bets on something only you can build.
Most organizations would rather copy the market leader and add one tweak. That's not strategy. That's drafting.
Believing vs. doing
There's a writer I just started following named Doc Adam. He recently published an essay called "Embrace the Remainder" that gets at something I've been chewing on for a while. He draws a distinction from religious studies and applies it to how we relate to information. Orthodoxy (right belief) vs. Orthopraxy (right practice).
His argument, roughly: we live in a culture that's obsessed with getting the picture right. Read more. Analyze more. Track more. Refresh the feed. The assumption is that if we can just understand enough, the right action will follow. This one hit close to home. I'm guilty of it. Mistaking the act of understanding something for the act of doing something about it. But understanding without practice is empty. The person refreshing the feed at 6 a.m. isn't learning. They're performing the ritual of a belief system that says knowledge comes from monitoring, not from doing.
This maps onto the strategy world more directly than it might seem. Companies commission reports, run workshops, build dashboards, track competitors, all in service of getting the picture right. But the picture is not the practice. Knowing your market position is not the same as making a strategic decision about it. Having the data is not the same as having the nerve to interpret it.
Organizations that are stuck in bad strategy are almost never short on information. They're short on practice. They don't lack reports — they lack the discipline of sitting in a room, naming what's actually wrong, and making a call they can't take back. That's orthopraxy. That's doing the thing, not just believing you understand the thing.
Monitoring feels like strategy the same way the feed feels like engagement. It has all the surface features. But nothing in it can refuse you. Nothing pushes back. Nothing forces a trade-off. And without that friction, there's no real thinking happening. Just the comfortable performance of thinking.
Why comfort wins
So here's the pattern I’ve been observing: bad strategy spreads because consensus is frictionless. Entire industries collapse onto the same future because betting on the trend is safer than betting on a diagnosis. Companies copy each other because differentiation requires trade-offs that feel like losses. And organizations mistake monitoring for practice because it lets them feel informed without ever being uncomfortable.
The common thread is comfort. Every one of these moves is a way of avoiding the specific discomfort that real strategy demands: the discomfort of being wrong, of being alone in your position, of cutting things that are working in order to build something that might work better.
The hype machine isn't just a machine that produces bad strategy. It's a machine that produces comfort. In a world full of uncertainty, comfort is the most addictive product on the market. It tells you that you don't have to do the hard thing because everyone else is doing the easy thing and they seem fine. It tells you the trend is the answer so you don't have to find your own. It tells you the report is the diagnosis so you don't have to sit in the discomfort of not knowing what it means.
The wrong answer is a warm room full of friends. The right question is a cold walk home alone. Most organizations will stay inside every time.
That's why the hype machine keeps winning. Not because people are dumb. Because people are human. And being human means that when you're offered a choice between a comfortable lie and an uncomfortable truth, the lie doesn't even have to be convincing. It just has to feel better.
Next: Part 3: Why Good Strategy Matters More Now Than Ever. If AI has compressed execution and the discourse itself has become unreliable, what's actually left? The thinking.
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Ben Jensen is a strategic advisor and human-centered designer at DESIGNJENSEN. He helps leaders turn strategic uncertainty into decisive action. If your strategy needs an honest diagnosis, start with a Strategy Sprint: two focused sessions, one clear action plan, zero bullshit.