The Same Meeting, Every Week

Maya sits in her fourth interview for the same job. The “culture fit” interviewer (a phrase she’d heard about but didn’t believe existed until today) debates scheduling a fifth round. As they speak, her phone buzzes: an offer from the startup that interviewed her once, last week. She glances at the person still weighing her fate and quietly accepts the other job via text.

The decision that needed to happen by Friday has been escalated twice — first to a committee that meets monthly, then to one that meets quarterly. By the time someone with authority sees it, the opportunity’s gone, the competitor's product has already launched, and the three people expecting an answer have already left the company.

Meanwhile, the exec team holds another meeting to discuss why everything seems to take so long.

The Antibodies of Fear

Every safeguard makes sense in isolation. A review to catch the obvious mistake. An approval to avoid the costly oversight. A committee to ensure no single person’s judgment can sink the ship.

But safeguards multiply like antibodies. Soon, the organization develops an immune response to its own survival. Each mistake avoided becomes retroactive proof that the next layer of oversight is essential too. The billing system overhaul now needs a task force. Not just to pick a vendor: to oversee the committee picking one.

These companies hum with activity. Meetings about the process for improving the process. Everyone busy: hands moving, decks updating, inboxes buzzing. All the while the real work slips further out of reach. They tend the machine, and the machine is now designed to prevent work from happening.

The Heretic’s Position

Someone always sees it first. You say something (gently) in the monthly planning meeting: the hiring committee has rejected twelve candidates for the same role. The “urgent” position has been open since January. It’s August.

Your manager’s face shifts into practiced neutrality. A look that says “let’s take this offline” but really means “let’s never talk about this again.” And just like that, you become that person. The one who says the thing everyone knows but no one wants to confront.

The loneliness doesn’t come from being wrong. It comes from seeing what others have chosen not to.

You're the one pointing out the roof is leaking while everyone else admires the new carpet.

The Tipping Point

There’s a moment when the cost of making a decision outweighs the value of the decision itself. When avoiding a mistake becomes more expensive than fixing it ever would’ve been. When caution curdles into pathology.

The strategic planning process now takes more time and money than the strategy could ever hope to recover. The product cycle outlasts the market. Risk assessments pile up, more expensive to conduct than the risks they claim to guard against.

From the inside, it feels like success. Look at everything we prevented! But what’s actually been accomplished, carefully and methodically, is the prevention of success itself.

Breaking Free

I used to think we were being careful. Then I realized we were just afraid.

The real danger isn’t moving too fast. It’s moving so cautiously that you never find out what works, only what doesn’t go wrong.

Progress is messy. So is survival.

What deserves respect isn’t recklessness. It’s a different kind of urgency, the kind that understands perfection can be negligent, that overthinking can kill good ideas before they ever draw breath.

The satisfaction doesn’t come from disruption. It comes from watching something start to move again — because someone finally said the quiet part out loud: the machine we built to help was quietly killing us instead.

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