There are 7 of us around this mahogany table, a piece of furniture so heavy and permanent it seems to mock the fleeting nature of the project it’s meant to support. The coffee is stale. No one is making eye contact.
This is the corporate séance. We aren’t here to communicate with the dead. We are here to pretend the dead are still alive. Project Nightingale’s vital signs flatlined 7 weeks ago. The charts are a mess of reds and ambers, a visual scream of failure. Yet here we are, listening to Mark talk about a ‘strategic pivot’ that sounds suspiciously like doing the same thing again but with a different font on the PowerPoint.
We blame this on politics. We blame it on a senior VP who has staked their reputation on Nightingale. We blame it on inter-departmental turf wars. And sure, those things are the kindling. But the fire, the thing that actually consumes millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human potential, is our collective, paralyzing fear of admitting a loss. We are all complicit in a