The air in Conference Room 7 is the consistency of lukewarm soup. It’s the kind of air that’s been recycled 47 times, each pass adding a new layer of unspoken resentment and burnt coffee. David is clicking his pen. A rhythmic, plastic tick-tock that’s counting down the seconds of my life I will never get back. We’re all here for the post-mortem of Project Chimera, an initiative that has been officially declared a ‘learning opportunity.’ This is corporate-speak for a dumpster fire so large it has its own zip code.

On the whiteboard, under the heading ‘What Went Well?’, someone has written ‘Team Collaboration.’ This is a lie. The design team and the engineering team communicated with all the cooperative spirit of two cats in a sack. But saying that would require naming names, and the first rule of the post-mortem is that the failure is an orphan. It has no parents. It simply materialized out of thin air, a product of ‘market headwinds’ and ‘synergistic misalignments.’

I’m thinking about the IKEA bookshelf I tried to build last night. The instructions, a masterpiece of minimalist ambiguity, showed a specific type of screw-let’s call it Screw C-being used in a pivotal step. I spent a solid twenty minutes frantically searching the plastic bags, my frustration mounting. There was no Screw C. The manufacturer had simply failed to include it. The plan, as written, was impossible to execute. I eventually jury-rigged it with a different screw and a prayer, but the finished product has a distinct, permanent wobble. This meeting feels exactly the same. We all know Screw C is missing. We all know the VP of Synergy, who is currently staring at his phone, made a unilateral decision 237 days ago that rendered the project’s foundation unsound. That was our missing screw. But no one will say it. Instead, we’re all pretending the instructions were perfect and we just need to try harder at… teamwork.

I once had coffee with a woman named Maria D.R., a corporate trainer who facilitates these sessions for a living. I expected a true believer, someone who drank the Kool-Aid from a firehose. What I got was a pragmatist with the weary eyes of a battlefield medic. I told her I found the entire process to be a form of institutional gaslighting. I expected her to defend her profession. She just stirred her latte and said, “My job isn’t to find the truth. It’s to help the organization create a plausible story about its own competence.”

I must have looked horrified, because she leaned in. “Look,” she said, her voice dropping, “most companies don’t actually want to learn. Learning is painful. It requires admitting that powerful, well-paid people were wrong. What they want is an artifact. A document. A PowerPoint deck with exactly 7 slides that they can put in a shared folder, proving they ‘addressed the issue.’ This document protects everyone.” I used to think she was a cynic. I now believe she was a realist. In fact, I’m starting to think she’s the only sane person I’ve ever met in this business. I thought she was part of the problem, but she was just the one honest enough to draw a diagram of it.

This is the core of the machine that guarantees repeated failure.

The ritual isn’t for learning; it’s for absolution. We confess to minor, systemic sins so that we can avoid confronting the major, personal ones. We blame ‘communication channels’ because we can’t blame the executive who refuses to read any email longer than a tweet. We blame ‘shifting project requirements’ because we can’t blame the director who treats the product roadmap like his personal Etch A Sketch. The goal isn’t to fix the organization’s memory but to selectively erase it. We create a fictional account of the past to make ourselves feel better about the future we know we’re not going to change.

What we really need is an objective, unblinking witness. A record that isn’t filtered through career anxiety and political maneuvering. It’s a strange thought, but I find myself wishing we had a high-quality, continuously recording poe camera mounted in the corner of every project meeting room. Not for surveillance in a creepy sense, but for forensics. An indisputable record. Can you imagine? We wouldn’t have to debate what was said. We could just roll the tape. We’d see the exact moment when the timeline was doubled with no budget increase. We’d hear the precise words used when a critical warning from the lead engineer was brushed aside. There would be no room for ‘misinterpretations’ or ‘misalignments.’ There would only be the data, raw and uncaring.

Instead, we have this. A room full of people negotiating a collective fiction. It creates a profound sense of learned helplessness that spreads through an organization like a virus. After you’ve sat through three of these post-mortems for three failed projects that all failed for the same unmentioned reason, you learn. You learn that your observations are not welcome. You learn that the truth is a career-limiting substance. So you stop. You stop caring, you stop pointing out the missing screw, and you just get really good at writing vague summaries for the ‘What Went Wrong?’ column. It’s a rational response to an irrational system. The cost of this charade isn’t just the $777,000 budget of Project Chimera. It’s the slow, grinding erosion of the collective will to build anything that doesn’t wobble.

Maria D.R. sent me a follow-up email a week after our coffee. It was a link to an article about organizational psychology, and a single line she had written: “They keep calling for an autopsy when they’re not even willing to admit the patient is dead.” That’s what this is. We’re not doctors trying to learn from a death; we’re amateur taxidermists trying to prop up a corpse and make it look like it’s just sleeping.

David’s pen stops clicking. The facilitator points to the whiteboard. “Great, this is some fantastic insight,” he says, with an enthusiasm that borders on pathological. “I’ll get these notes typed up and distributed by end-of-day. Let’s make sure we really action these learnings on the next project.” A few people nod. Someone closes their laptop with a decisive snap. The meeting is over. A PDF will be generated. It will be emailed to a distribution list of 77 people. And it will be instantly archived, unread, into a digital tomb, another perfect, useless story.