Two tech leaders on my team opened an org-wide planning presentation this week by promising we were about to get "lovely poetry and lots of exciting things." They were not being metaphorical.
Two tech leaders (who I adore working with) opened a presentation to the broader organization this week with a line I didn’t expect. Leader 1 framed the session — a planning-framework update, the kind of thing that usually gets sent as a one-pager nobody reads — and told us that her colleague was about to walk us through “lovely poetry and lots of exciting things.”
She was not being metaphorical. The presentation that followed was built around four quotations from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, written in 1711, and it used those quotations the way a well-structured essay uses headings: to carry the shape of the argument.
I have watched hundreds of internal process presentations. I have given many of them myself. They are almost always information-dense and craft-light. The assumption inside most organizations is that internal audiences do not need storytelling, they just need the decisions. This presentation upended that assumption. Watching a technical colleague apply literary craft to an engineering update was indeed one of the loveliest highlights of my week, because it is the kind of move most organizations don’t reward and most presenters do not attempt.
A filter for wisdom
The framework being introduced was a three-level planning hierarchy: an Initiative is a strategic commitment, a Project is a buildable unit inside that commitment, and a Milestone is a named yes-or-no checkpoint with its own date. Most of us have seen some version of that hierarchy before. What made this worth sitting through was not the framework itself. It was the way the presenter chose to introduce it.
He said, almost in passing, that he had been reading more poetry lately. He was using it, he said, as a filter for wisdom. Then he noted that many phrases most of us assume came from the Bible or Shakespeare actually came from A. Pope: “to err is human, to forgive divine,” “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And all of it was written by A. Pope before he was twenty-five (what a brain!). He had the room’s attention before he had argued anything.
Four quotes, four moments
The first Pope line he used was the one that made me sit up.
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.
Pope is writing about the endless horizon of learning. How every piece of knowledge gained reveals another still to be understood. The application to project work is almost too exact: every scope you think you have understood reveals another scope hiding behind it. You reach the top of what you thought was the whole mountain, and you are looking at a range that was invisible from the bottom. Every design and product leader has lived this pattern. Very few of us have named it with a line that old.
The second quote landed the framework itself.
Those rules of old, discovered, not devised, / Our nature still, but nature methodized.
This is the one I have been thinking about since the meeting. The argument, underneath the couplet, was that the framework being introduced had not been invented by anyone in the room. It had been discovered, learned from watching projects break, codified from scar tissue, methodized from what the team had already figured out the hard way. The implication matters. Rules are not constraints imposed from above. They are the crystallized form of what has already worked. The team did not need to accept the framework because a leader had handed it to them. They needed to accept it because it described what they had already learned.
The third quote appeared when he reached the hardest part of any planning conversation. The part where people worry that accountability will shade into blame.
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see / Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.
No project runs perfectly. No plan survives contact with reality. What the framework asked for was not perfect execution. It asked for a plan that existed, and risks that were visible early. Applause, the presenter said, not metaphorically, is due to teams that met those two bars, even if the outcome was bumpy. The Pope quote gave him cover to say something humane about how execution should be evaluated, and he took it.
The fourth moment was the sentence I have been trying to find for years, and this one was his own, not Pope’s:
Planning where you need to be by when is not waterfall. Not planning is not agile. It’s just hoping.
This is the cleanest framing I have heard of the most tired dichotomy in our industry. Agile, in the way it has been ossified into bad practice, has become an excuse not to plan. Waterfall, in the way it has been caricatured, has become a bogeyman people invoke to avoid committing to anything. The actual difference is whether you have milestones, verifiable yes-or-no checkpoints that get you from here to there. If you do, you are planning. If you do not, you are hoping. Hope is a beautiful thing. It is not a plan.
The craft underneath the content
There’s a craft observation here that I want to call out because I think most design leaders have already clicked with it. Internal-facing work, the kind that goes to other teams, other leaders, the extended organization, is almost universally undersold in terms of craft. We apply our design rigor to customer-facing products. We don’t apply it to the way we introduce a planning framework, or onboard a new process, or explain a reorg. We treat internal communication as a deliverable rather than an artifact.
What I watched this week was an engineering leader quietly arguing, through the shape of his own presentation, that internal work deserves the same craft. He did not announce that argument. He demonstrated it. He read some poetry, he noticed some patterns, he built a talk around them. And the talk is the reason a room full of senior people left with shared vocabulary for something that had been slipping through our fingers for months.
The next time you have to introduce something at scale inside your organization — a new framework, a new process, a new expectation — consider whether the presentation you are about to give is worthy of the decision you are trying to land. If it is not, consider reading a little poetry.