“I Can Show You the World…” 🎶
It always begins the same way. A manager steps up, eyes shining, PowerPoint queued, ready to unveil The Transformation. The music swells in your head:
— “I can show you the world…” 🎶
—Every manager launching yet another ‘journey.’
Welcome to The Journey—corporate jargon’s favorite catch-all phrase. Change? That’s a journey. Onboarding? A journey. Organizational meltdown? Don’t worry, it’s just part of the journey.
By now, every process, project, and restructuring effort has been fluffed up and polished until it shines with the aspirational glow of “we’re really looking forward to this journey.”
Everything Is a Journey. To Nowhere
Somewhere along the way, “journey” became the ultimate buzzword for hedging against failure. It’s a magical word—soft, aspirational, and vague enough to make even the most chaotic initiatives sound visionary.
“We’re figuring things out as we go” doesn’t land well on a PowerPoint slide. But “We’re on a journey toward operational excellence”? Chef’s kiss—instant applause, no questions asked.
The problem? Most of these so-called journeys have no map, no compass, and no clear destination. They’re less like trekking toward enlightenment and more like wandering through IKEA on a Saturday, clutching a crumpled floor plan everyone agrees is useless but refuses to let go of.
- You’re not fixing a broken process—you’re embarking on a “journey of operational efficiency.”
- You’re not onboarding a clunky new tool—you’re starting a “journey of empowerment.”
- Someone quits their miserable job? Don’t worry, they’re “moving on to the next stage of their career journey”, as though fleeing a toxic workplace is a spiritual pilgrimage.
The kicker? Most people who are supposedly “on the journey” have no idea they’re traveling anywhere. Your C-level execs and middle managers might wax poetic about the journey to agile ways of working, diversity and inclusion, or Mars colonization. But for everyone else? It’s just Wednesday. They’re not on a journey—they’re at work, trying to meet their deadlines while dodging unnecessary meetings.
A Journey Is Not a Product, It’s a Hedge
The corporate “journey” isn’t just another word for a project—it’s far more insidious. Projects have measurable goals, deadlines, and deliverables. Projects can succeed, but more importantly, they can fail—and failure is scary.
Journeys, on the other hand, are built to be failure-proof. They’re open-ended and deliberately nebulous:
- Projects can fail.
- Journeys “evolve.”
- Projects have accountability.
- Journeys are “learning experiences.”
See the trick? By calling something a “journey,” you can dodge hard questions and sprinkle in enough aspirational buzzwords to keep stakeholders nodding in approval. It’s failure rebranded as progress.
But here’s the reality: work isn’t a linear path with a triumphant destination waiting at the end. When organizations treat every initiative like a Journey, they’re contradicting the principles of modern product thinking.
The LinkedIn Farewell Post: A Masterclass in Corporate Storytelling
Nowhere is the word “journey” more misused than on LinkedIn. It’s the perfect platform for turning soul-crushing chaos into a neatly packaged tale of triumph.
— “After an incredible journey, I’m excited to move on to new opportunities!”
Translation: It wasn’t incredible. It was a nightmare of alignment meetings, missed deadlines, and passive-aggressive emails. But LinkedIn doesn’t reward honesty. You can’t exactly write:
— “I’m leaving because my team got reorganized six times, the CRM migration failed twice, and my manager sent me on a ‘journey of empowerment’ that mostly involved PowerPoint slides.”
But you can’t say that, can you? Admitting the “journey” was a nightmare is taboo—like showing up to a farewell party and flipping the cake table.
Instead, we’re stuck pretending every experience, no matter how awful, was “a journey of growth and learning.” It’s not fooling anyone, but we all play along anyway because corporate culture demands it.
Why Journeys Clash with the Product Mindset
The product mindset is all about continuous improvement. A product evolves over time—it never “arrives.” There’s no flag-planting, no triumphant conclusion where everyone gets to pat themselves on the back. The work is iterative, incremental, and never truly finished.
But a journey? That’s linear. A journey has a start, an imagined endpoint, and a story you tell about how you got there. It’s about chasing the illusion of a perfect future, not delivering real, incremental value.
Sure, journeys make sense in some contexts—user journeys, customer journeys, the paths people take through a product or service. Those are practical, grounded, and meaningful. But when the entire organization is suddenly “on a journey”? It’s nothing more than a shiny, feel-good distraction.
Let’s Keep Journeys for Frodo
At the end of the day, the word journey belongs in epic fantasies:
- Scaling mountains.
- Hauling cursed rings to Mount Doom.
- Navigating airport security with three kids under five.
They don’t belong in your roadmap, your re-org strategy, or your failing project.
Here’s the thing: failure is not the enemy. Small experiments that go sideways, flawed features that ship fast, and fast failures that teach you something valuable? That’s how you move forward. That’s the work.
What’s not okay is the opposite: bloated projects or sprawling programs that drag on endlessly because they’re too big to fail. You know the ones—where no one wants to admit the mistakes, so they’re rebranded as “a journey” to justify their existence. These initiatives eat resources, stifle innovation, and go nowhere.
When something’s not working, strike it down. Don’t drag it into the corporate Camino trekking just because you’re scared of saying, “This didn’t work.” End it, reflect on why it failed, and figure out how the problem can be tackled differently. That’s where progress lives.
Let’s Stop Lying to Ourselves
When we call every bloated, stuck-in-the-mud project a “journey,” we lose two things: the courage to fail quickly and the honesty to fix what’s broken. Instead of progress, we get prolonged decay, wrapped up in aspirational language no one believes.
Call it an experiment. Call it a project. Call it a learning moment. Just stop calling it a journey unless you’re hauling a cursed artifact across Middle-earth or at least have an actual map in hand.
Because I, for one, would rather skip the corporate carpet ride entirely. And maybe—just maybe—get somewhere worthwhile.