“Hell is other people,” wrote Sartre — not because they are cruel, but because they are mirrors.
Every interaction reflects a version of ourselves we didn’t author: our habits, our blind spots, our unfinished drafts of conviction. It’s uncomfortable — especially when you care.
Passion feels like purpose until someone questions it. Then it feels like betrayal. The same energy that fuels great work can quickly harden into defensiveness when challenged. We mistake friction for disrespect and critique for control.
In the sprint theatre of modern work, that defensiveness hides beneath a noble script: I just want it to work. But beneath that line is a quieter plea — please don’t make me doubt it. The more invested we are in an idea, the harder it becomes to hear what the work itself is trying to tell us.
This is not arrogance; it’s attachment. The unintentional performance of certainty.
And in a world obsessed with velocity, that attachment can turn passion from a compass into a cage.
Scenario: Edge conditions
It was the third rejection this sprint. Another failed QA. Another red ticket with her name on it.
The fix was clean. Elegant, even. She’d refactored half the module to make it future-proof. Yet there it was again — that line she’d come to dread: “Fails under edge conditions — needs review.”
Edge conditions. She almost laughed. What about everything that wasn’t an edge? It worked on her machine, and on every other environment she’d tested.
The rejection landed like a personal attack. It wasn’t the bug that stung; it was the implication that she hadn’t worked hard enough.
The next stand-up rolls around, and her sentences have edges of their own. “I’ll check it again,” she says, voice clipped to professionalism. “But the code behaves as expected.”
She wasn’t wrong — just alone in her frame of reference. The code did behave as expected. The question was whether those expectations still matched the system around it, or if they were even calibrated correctly in the first place.
Every sprint has its own gravity. The deeper you fall into a task, the smaller the world becomes. What starts as focus turns into ownership; ownership turns into identity. Soon, the work stops being something you do and starts being something you are.
That’s when feedback feels like friction. And friction, misunderstood, feels like threat. It’s not ego — it’s the ache of effort being reinterpreted.
But the tragedy of that ache is how quietly it narrows the field of view. What begins as care hardens into certainty. The edges blur until “my machine” feels like the only world that works.
The Trap of Small Wins
The hard part about Local Optimisation is that it rewards the people who care the most. The ones who tighten every bolt, polish every edge, and believe excellence lives in the details. They’re usually right — until they aren’t.
From her desk, precision looked like respect: for the craft, for the product, for the promise that good work should speak for itself. But systems rarely speak one language. Every perfect line of code, every tidy process, every well-defended boundary tells a partial truth.
What feels like integrity from the inside can look like inflexibility from the outside. And when collaboration turns into collision, both sides are baffled — each convinced they’re protecting quality.
That’s the paradox of local success: it feels virtuous while quietly eroding connection. We optimise what we can control, and in doing so, lose sight of what we share.
Empathy begins when we see that precision and perspective aren’t rivals; they’re partners. The challenge isn’t to care less — it’s to care wider.
The Comfort of Closed Circuits
When everything feels urgent, narrowing the field of vision feels like sanity — a small perimeter you can actually maintain. Within it, things make sense. Priorities are clear, progress measurable. The noise lies beyond the perimeter — out of sight, out of mind.
But comfort is a quiet architect. Over time, those perimeters harden into boundaries. Collaboration becomes conditional; curiosity starts to feel inefficient. The emergence of proprietary nomenclature, dialects, and rituals represents the mirage of fluency at the expense of universality.
This is how Silo Thinking forms — not through arrogance, but through exhaustion. It’s the defensive geometry of people who care too much for too long without a common language of value. Each circuit closes to protect its voltage in order to power its own sense of purpose.
They produce output, activity, motion — but little exchange. Signals loop endlessly, metrics glow reassuringly… there may well be proof of progress, but when viewed from above, the system is a constellation of disconnected lights.
The challenge isn’t to break the circuits, but to reconnect them. Because without discomfort, even the brightest work eventually powers only itself.
The Mirage of Measurement
From deep inside a closed circuit, the world looks coherent. Outputs accumulate. Graphs rise in satisfying gradients. Progress, on paper, is indisputable — and entirely self-referential.
This is the seduction of Goodhart’s Law:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Once performance is defined by what can be counted, meaning shrinks to fit the metric. The signal loops, and the illusion of success becomes indistinguishable from success itself. The tragedy isn’t deceit; it’s isolation.
Cut off from external feedback, the only option is to orbit back to proprietary evidence. “Meaningful progress” becomes a private language, fluent only to those inside the silo. The outside world stops understanding what the numbers mean — and eventually stops asking.
Metrics, like mirrors, reward visibility. They show motion, not movement. They turn questions of purpose into questions of compliance. And the more comforting the numbers become, the less credible curiosity becomes.
So the system keeps score — loudly, elegantly, relentlessly — while the game it was meant to measure drifts quietly out of view.
The Theatre of Truth
Every system has its priests. Not in robes, but in credentials, dashboards, and presentation decks. Their sermons are updates; their scriptures, metrics.
What began as a tool for understanding has become a performance of authority — a loop where data defines reality and reality must conform to data. This is the cycle of Power/Knowledge described by Michel Foucault: those who decide what counts as truth also decide what can be known.
Inside the organisation, visibility becomes virtue. To be seen to know is safer than to know. The spectacle of comprehension replaces comprehension itself.
The work no longer speaks for itself; it’s spoken for, translated into numbers that travel better than nuance. The performance of competence protects reputations, budgets, and hierarchies. Certainty is rewarded; doubt is quietly demoted. And yet, the more perfect the performance, the more fragile the understanding beneath it.
This is how truth turns theatrical — not false, but curated.
Conclusion
Whether through arrogance or ignorance, the rejection of social exposure — or even the perception of surveillance — is an act of self-harm. It severs the very feedback loop that growth depends on.
When we hide behind certainty, we shield ourselves not from failure, but from evolution. The world becomes a mirror with the contrast turned up: everything looks sharper, but nothing gets clearer.
Genuine confidence — confidence that is earned from verified/validated success — can absorb disagreement without dissolving. It trusts that being seen does not mean being judged — that scrutiny, handled with humility, is the very essence of collaboration.
This is the immune response of a healthy system: not to repel critique, but to metabolise it. To turn friction into signal. To trade performance for participation.
Because when visibility becomes vulnerability instead of virtue, what follows isn’t exposure — it’s connection. And that is what makes the work work.
Behavioural Principles
The Work that Works
-
True confidence is porous.
It bends with feedback instead of breaking under it. -
Care without context becomes isolation.
Passion turns defensive when connection feels like interference. -
Boundaries harden when empathy runs dry.
Silo thinking isn’t arrogance — it’s exhaustion. -
The glow of progress is not proof of it.
Metrics reward visibility, not understanding. -
Power decides what can be known.
Authority becomes the stage where truth is performed. -
Scrutiny is not surveillance.
Handled with humility, it’s collaboration in disguise. -
When visibility becomes vulnerability, connection begins.
That’s when work stops performing — and starts evolving.
