Organizations are organisms that resist their own truth

Kayfabe is a word that comes, I believe is a carny word that is used and applied to professional wrestling and it means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real.

If you as someone who sees this can see that wait a second, the official strategy is definitely not going to work, you're like, 'I got to tell somebody. We're doing work that's going in a bad direction. It's not going to work.' And you go and say, 'I think that it's actually not going to work for these reasons.' And what someone will say to you, this happens by the way, I'm not substituting any particular organization, this happens literally in all organizations to some degree, is the senior person will say, 'Alex, I agree with you. It's not perfect, but if you hit the ground truth button, if you share that and everybody, the whole thing will shatter and we can't do anything.'

The underlying dynamic that must be true in any organization on a fundamental basis is you can't make your boss look dumb because if you do, they're the person who decides, 'Oh, this person's not performing,' or whatever. And that one little asymmetry, that one little fact, in most cases it does not matter. That one little asymmetry is what leads to the systemic compounding thing where you get these really weird dysfunctional emergent things that everybody hates, nobody wants, and yet nobody is in the position to change per se.

The atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions. If you really start unpacking how the decisions are made where people are frustrated in the decision-making process, you're going to find exactly the problems in the company.