I’ve worked as a retailer and consultant to retailers long enough to see most cycles repeat themselves, just with better decks and new titles. Even today, as I strive to help retailers reduce friction and accelerate how they make and execute decisions, I still get a front-row seat to moments when uncertainty spikes, pressure builds, and leaders revert to shortcuts. The industry is full of repeatable cycles and self-fulfilling prophecies.

I remember my first encounter with a Chief Digital Officer, a complete evangelist who had no qualms about saying things like, "We are a telco. No one, absolutely no one, wants to go into our stores. They do it because they have to." 

He built a whole business unit, including a renovated store floor to make it feel fancier. They even had an engine-powered ice cooler that would drive around the floor, dispensing drinks on Friday afternoons. It was full of ego and absolute certainty. 

Over the next several years, they delivered a better mobile app, but digital sales barely moved an inch. The progress was so minuscule that it reached the point where things like prepaid recharges and bill payments started creeping into the digital transactions pool to make the situation look better and more successful than it actually was. 

Most of the roles we have invented fail because they try to concentrate responsibility without redistributing power.

I fought as hard as I could, but in the end, we all capitulated. All their business cases took full-time employees out of stores, so the people I ultimately let down were the store teams left to serve just as many customers with fewer resources. 

I wish this were a one-off situation, but I have had clients ranging from big-box retailers to banks that all believed the same thing: whether they were gung-ho about digital, sustainability, or AI, they innately felt that if they drew a box on a linear org chart, then bam!, the solution was delivered. 

That means, every so often, a new executive title pops up that makes me roll my eyes so wildly that it becomes audible. Chief Divination Officer. Chief Visionary Officer. How do people not see this as I do? We are just creating a “Chief Whatever-Feels-Best-Right-Now Officer.” Not to mention, unless you are a literal astrology brand, you will never need a Chief Divination Officer.

Over time, I’ve realized that my reaction is valid, but incomplete. 

Because titles like this do not appear out of nowhere; they show up when something more profound is broken. They are a symptom, not a cause. And in retail right now, the symptom is infiltrating every nook and cranny of this industry. 

Where Retail Has Vision, it Lacks Mobility

The myth we keep telling ourselves is that retailers are behind because they fail to anticipate trends, that they lack the knowledge or insight to see what's coming. In my experience, at least, that is seldom true. Most of the retailers I’ve worked for and consulted have seen shifts coming. They saw digital behaviors changing, social commerce rising, and stores being questioned, reimagined, and re-weighted, but they could not act as quickly.

It’s easier to hire a person than to change a system, but hiring a person won’t fix an immovable system.

While consumer behavior moves at social speed, planning cycles continue to operate with annual budgets, seasonal resets, and multi-year tech roadmaps. Leadership teams can’t get ahead of the disruption they see barreling in because by the time decisions are approved, the context that initially justified them has shifted. 

This is not a race to be ahead of trends, but rather, a race to be the least behind. And it is in this gap between awareness and action that arbitrary roles and titles creep in. Part of the reason retailers fall into this same trap actually has nothing to do with retail at all. It is all psychological. 

This Is Just as Much Chemistry as It Is Strategy 

Humans are wired to seek order. Uncertainty makes us uncomfortable, and ambiguity feels unsafe. When things feel chaotic, our brains look for structure, naming, and hierarchy. Putting something in a box creates a sense of control. It calms us and feels like progress, even if nothing has actually changed. 

Retail right now lives in a constant state of uncertainty. Channels fragment, customers contradict themselves, and performance data points in ten directions simultaneously. We’re operating at 100 miles per hour, but we're not actually going anywhere. 

When leaders are under that level of pressure, they do the most human thing they can do: organize the mess. 

We label the problem. 

We say, “We have a digital problem.” Wham. Hire a Chief Digital Officer. That feels better. 

We say, “We have an innovation problem.” Enter the Chief Innovation Officer. 

We say, “We have a vision problem.” Cue the Corporate Fortune Teller.

These glitzy titles provide psychological reassurance and create the illusion for consumers, employees, and shareholders that everything is under control. People believe the problem is contained because there is a person “responsible” for it, but the reality is, relief is not resolution.

Confidence is Currency

When data multiplies and clarity disappears, confidence becomes currency. The person who sounds most certain feels like the safest bet, and their conviction outranks intentionality and accuracy. This is where vision-oriented roles can quietly slip into something else: narrative authority, not true foresight. 

That CDO I mentioned? He was intelligent, charismatic, and genuinely believed what he was saying. But absolutism is seductive and usually incorrect. Retail is rarely either-or. It is messy, contextual, and grounded in human behavior, all of which are highly nuanced. Confidence makes for great presentations and taglines in press releases, but reality is often less cooperative and absolute. 

This is the real risk of outsourcing "vision" to a single role. When the system cannot decide, it starts rewarding certainty instead. And certainty, especially under pressure, is not the same thing as being right. 

The (Somewhat) Unexciting Solution

What makes this frustrating is that we already have examples of how to do this well. They just are not in the form of a flashy job title or a highly charismatic executive. 

Disney Imagineering is a valuable counterpoint because, although it is magic, it’s also operational. Imagineering is a deeply integrated, multidisciplinary system that combines design, engineering, storytelling, finance, and operations. It has absolute authority and long time horizons. Most critically, it is embedded in how Disney builds experiences across every part of the business, from theme parks and cruise ships to movies and retail stores. The same operational philosophy runs through all of them. 

Vision is not separated from execution. The people imagining are also the people building, so real constraints from the start shape ideas. While some visionaries dream from an ivory tower, Disney Imagineering ensures all ideas survive contact with reality early in the process. Vision is established and upheld through an operating model in which imagination and delivery are inseparable. No outside oracle required.

IKEA US took a different but equally instructive approach with sustainability. Rather than hiring a Chief Sustainability Officer and hoping for the best, they made the CEO the CSO. Every conversation had authority, and every business unit had space given to the topic. It was not a reporting function bolted onto the side of the organization. Instead, it was woven into every decision because the person accountable for the business was also accountable for the mission. 

Both examples share something important: they redistribute decision-making instead of concentrating responsibility in a single role.

No Title Can Mask Corporate Immobility

Most of the roles we have invented fail because they try to concentrate responsibility without redistributing power.

A title cannot compensate for rigid governance, and a visionary cannot outrun approval layers, incentive structures, or tech debt. If the system stays the same, then the role becomes ornamental at best and a scapegoat at worst. 

This is why so many Chief Innovation Officers end up running workshops instead of shipping change, why Chief Digital Officers burn out fighting org charts instead of building capabilities, and why Chief Vision roles drift toward theatre.

It’s easier to hire a person than to change a system, but hiring a person won’t fix an immovable system. 

The Uncomfortable Reality 

The uncomfortable truth for retail leaders is that if your organisation needs a special role to give it permission to act, the problem isn't imagination; it’s agility. 

Retailers do not need more people telling them what the future might look like. They need operating rhythms that let them test, learn, decide, and move before the future becomes the present. That means shorter decision loops, clear ownership, and real authority distributed through the organization. The ability to kill ideas early without politics. Planning horizons that acknowledge how quickly assumptions expire. 

It also means resisting the urge to soothe anxiety with titles. Naming a problem feels productive, but fixing the conditions that create the problem to begin with is much harder. This is hard work worth doing.

The age of the Corporate Fortune Teller tells us something important: Companies aren’t foolish; they’re overwhelmed. And vision isn’t always lacking or missing entirely; it’s just that the systems designed to support them are too slow and unstable to create momentum. 

Every organization is different, and so are its problems, but the solution is not another title. What’s needed is a much more complicated, even uncomfortable, conversation about how we actually make decisions, who has authority to act, and whether we are willing to change the structures that keep us stuck. 

I’m interested to see who is willing to have it.

This is part of our series on developing vision for modern retail executives. Read part one, the role of the Chief Vision Officer.