The Mechanical Reminder

The projector fan is a low-frequency hum that vibrates the back of my teeth, a mechanical reminder that we are all trapped in a room together while a man in a $888 suit explains why we no longer exist as we did yesterday. On the screen, a new organizational chart flickers into existence. It is a terrifyingly complex web of solid lines and dotted lines, an Escher drawing of corporate ambition where ‘Synergy’ has replaced ‘Sales’ and ‘Human Capital Optimization’ has swallowed the HR department whole.

Ruby M.-L., our lead safety compliance auditor, is sitting three seats down from me. She has a notebook open, but she isn’t writing. She’s staring at a specific box labeled ‘Integrated Risk Solutions’ and I can see the vein in her temple beginning to pulse at exactly 68 beats per minute. Ruby knows what I know: none of this addresses the fact that the actual pressure valves on the main line haven’t been calibrated since 2018 because the budget for tools was diverted to pay for this very rebranding.

The Liturgical Dance

Ruby M.-L. finally leans over to me. Her voice is a dry rasp, the sound of someone who has spent too much time reading regulatory fine print. ‘Who signs the Level 4 hazard permits now?’ she asks. I look back at the screen. The department that used to handle that, ‘Field Operations,’ has been fractured into ‘Asset Lifecycle Management’ and ‘Operational Excellence.’ I point at the chart, tracing a dotted line that leads from a vice president I’ve never heard of to a vacant box that simply says ‘To Be Determined.’

– Dialogue

‘Nobody,’ I whisper back. ‘Or everybody. Which in this building means the same thing.’

This is the great ritual of the corporate re-org. It is a liturgical dance designed to create the illusion of progress without the messy inconvenience of actually fixing anything. We spend $558,000 on consultants who tell us that our silos are too thick, so we tear them down and build ‘cross-functional pods.’ Then, 18 months later, we realize the pods are too chaotic, so we build ‘centers of excellence,’ which are just silos with better coffee machines.

Lobotomized Efficiency

I’ve made mistakes in these transitions before. Once, I tried to champion a ‘Lean’ initiative that ended up cutting the very people who knew where the physical blueprints for the 1988 cooling system were kept. I thought I was being efficient; I was actually just being lobotomized. When those people left with their severance packages, we lost 128 years of collective memory. Now, when a pipe bursts, we don’t call a plumber; we call a meeting to discuss which department is ‘accountable’ for the water damage.

Ruby M.-L. stands up during the Q&A. She doesn’t ask about the vision or the ‘north star’ of the company. She asks, ‘If there is a gas leak in Sector G at 2:00 AM on a Saturday, which one of these boxes picks up the phone?’

– The Unanswered Question

The executive on stage smiles a practiced, plastic smile. It’s the kind of smile you see on people who have never had grease under their fingernails. He talks about ‘centralized response protocols’ and ‘automated escalation paths.’ He uses the word ‘holistic’ eight times in three sentences. He never actually answers the question.

The Plumbing of Truth

This is why an ‘audit-first’ philosophy is so threatening to the corporate hierarchy. It demands a look at the actual plumbing of the system, not the painted lines on the floor. To truly understand why an organization is failing, you have to stop looking at the PowerPoint and start looking at the way energy and information actually flow through the pipes. It requires a level of honesty that most boardrooms find allergic.

It’s about finding the real problem, not the one that’s easiest to solve with a new title. If the system is broken, changing the name of the department is just putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling dam. You need to look at the structure itself, which is something rickg energy emphasizes when evaluating how systems actually perform under pressure versus how they look on a spreadsheet.

Performative Work Metrics

Physical Marks

I look at my hand. There’s a smudge of blue ink on my thumb from the one pen that leaked. It’s messy, but at least the ink is real. It’s a physical mark in a world of digital abstractions. Ruby M.-L. is packing her bags before the meeting is even over. She’s seen enough. She knows that in three weeks, she’ll be asked to audit a process that no longer has an owner, for a manager who doesn’t have the authority to fix the findings, in a building that is technically owned by a subsidiary that was sold off in the ‘Portfolio Optimization’ of last Tuesday.

The Reality Underground

As the meeting breaks up, the room is filled with the sound of chairs scraping against the floor-a discordant symphony of 188 people who are all wondering if their badge will still work at the turnstile tomorrow. I catch Ruby’s eye as we head for the exit. She looks at the blue ink on my thumb and then at the screen where the new org chart is still glowing, a ghost of a plan for a company that no longer knows how to talk to itself.

‘I’m going to the basement,’ she says. ‘The sensors down there don’t care what department they report to. They just report the truth.’

We don’t need a re-org. We need a wrench. We need to stop pretending that moving the boxes on the screen changes the reality of the metal in the ground. But until then, we’ll keep attending the meetings, keep printing the new business cards, and keep wondering why, despite all this ‘progress,’ the water in the breakroom still tastes like rust.