I don’t know if the story you’re about to read is literally true. It may be a business parable that’s been passed around long enough to feel historical. I’ve seen versions of it attributed to Arie de Geus, and I was reminded of it while rereading “The Art of the Long View” by Peter Schwartz.

Whether it’s fact or fable, the point it makes still holds.

In the early twentieth century, a group of British scientists encountered a tribe on the Malaysian Peninsula that had little contact with the modern world. The tribe was so isolated that it had yet to invent the wheel. The scientists invited the tribe’s chief to travel with them to the nearest modern city, Singapore, so he could see the latest wonders.

For a day, they showed the chief what they assumed would be astonishing: tall buildings, elevators, electric lights, locomotives, machines. Then they brought him back to his village.

When they asked what had made the biggest impression, the chief didn’t mention the buildings or the locomotives or electricity. Instead, he said he’d seen a man carrying more bananas than anyone in his tribe could carry. How? The man from the city was carting a pile of bananas in a wheelbarrow.

The key to the story isn’t the wheelbarrow, however. It’s the bananas.

The chief already had a mental category for bananas. His civilization had bananas. He could relate to gathering them, carrying them, needing them. The wheelbarrow made sense because it amplified something he understood already. The rest of the city, electricity, locomotives, infrastructure, fell outside his field of experience. It was as if they hadn’t been there at all.

We don’t see what we’re not prepared to see. This is where most strategy rollouts go wrong.

Leaders assume that if they explain the strategy clearly enough, people will get it. They build PowerPoint decks, write memos, hold town halls. They describe the future in words and diagrams, then wonder why nothing changes.

What’s actually happening is simpler and more uncomfortable. The strategy lives outside people’s existing conceptual categories. So it doesn’t register. It isn’t debated or resisted. They just don’t see it. People can’t move toward a future they can’t recognize.

That’s why one used car dealership transformation worked when so many don’t.

I first came across this example in writing by Larry Johnson. A son inherited his father’s car dealership, a classic hard-sell operation where customers were treated as transactions to close. The son hated that “Always Be Closing” model. He wanted to shift the entire business to a human-friendly, customer-first approach.

He didn’t start by rewriting the strategy or lecturing the staff. Instead, he sent his managers to customer experience training run by the Ritz-Carlton. The managers came back changed. They had experienced a completely different operating model. They had seen what customer-first looked like when it was real, not aspirational. When they returned, implementing the strategy became dramatically easier, because people weren’t being asked to imagine a future. They had visited it.

This is the real work of strategy rollout.

If you want people to adopt a new strategy, you have to help them see it, not just hear about it. That might mean a pilot project, a prototype, a shadowing experience, a visit to another organization, or a lived demonstration of the future state.

This isn’t about motivation or compliance. It’s about preparation. Until people have a mental handle for the new direction, the strategy goes by like electric lights and locomotives. Not actively shunned. Just unseen.