The Unreliable
Narrator
In literature, the narrator tells a story they believe is true, but their perspective is limited by what they don't know.
At work, our artifacts — dashboards, roadmaps, and KPIs — are narrators too. They tell coherent stories. But coherence is not the same thing as truth.
A Note from the Author
As a fan of movies and content, I sometimes find myself thinking about what happens in cinema when we have a meeting that goes off the rails.
I look at "Green" dashboards that feel like fiction, and I realize: we are living in a movie with an unreliable narrator.
This exploration is a study of that friction—the gap between the story we tell ourselves and the reality of the systems we build.
Multiple Truths Appear
Four witnesses describe the same crime. Each account is Convincing. None agree. Everyone is telling the truth as they experienced it.
Artifacts as Evidence
A story pulled from objects in the room. You trusted the structure, so you trusted the story.
The System Is the Narrator
Decisions Without Memory
Timeline Collapse
Everything looks aligned — until integration time.
The Ghost in the Machine
Closing the Loop
We ship a "temporary" fix today, knowing it will break the life of our future selves in 18 months.
The Green Light Theater
Every one of these is green. Every one of these is telling you a story. The interesting part is what the story leaves out.
Managing the Map,
Ignoring the Ground
A perfectly constructed world. Every metric says it's real — until you walk to the edge and touch the painted sky.
Alignment is often a measurement of how well we’ve agreed to ignore the territory.
The Reveal
This isn't an indictment. It's a recognition.
Every organization has unreliable narrators.
Not because people are dishonest,
but because systems are partial by design.
A dashboard can only show what it was built to measure. A roadmap can only reflect what was agreed to discuss. A retrospective can only surface what feels safe to say.
That's not failure — that's the nature of any narrative. The challenge isn't eliminating the narrator. It's remembering there is one.
Field Guide to Narrative Drift
Patterns worth noticing — not to assign blame, but to start better conversations.
The Performance Mirage
Metrics stay green while delivery slows. The system is optimizing for the narrator rather than the work.
Try asking: "What would this dashboard look like if we added the things we chose not to measure?"
Semantic Drift
Integrations fail despite "successful" milestones. The same words mean different things to different teams.
Try asking: "When we say 'ready,' what would need to be true for you to ship tomorrow?"
The Archive of Optimism
The "Later" column grows quietly. Deferred decisions compound interest that eventually comes due.
Try asking: "If we could only keep 3 items in 'Later,' which would survive? What does that tell us?"
The Blind Spot Report
Tools report clean results — not because everything is clean, but because they can only see what they were built to see.
Try asking: "What can't this tool see? What language, service, or path isn't covered?"
The unreliable narrator isn't a villain. It's a lens. Once you see it, you start asking different questions — not "is this metric right?" but "what story is this metric trying to tell, and what did it leave out?"
That's where the interesting work begins.
A Strategic Operations Research Project
Applying US Patent 12,106,240 B2 to the challenge of organizational sensemaking.