When a company says, “we are what we know,” it is one technical shift away from panic.
Mircea Eliade drew a useful line: knowledge explains the world and ages with it. Myth does something else. It tells people who they are and how to act, so it does not expire on the same clock.
The failure mode is easy to see. A team builds its identity around being the smartest analysts in the room. Then a model does the first pass in seconds. If expertise was doing double duty as identity, the update lands as humiliation. People defend the old workflow, hide the truth, and call it rigor.
Leaders need both layers, but not mixed together. Let knowledge stay mortal. Replace methods, tools, and roles without sentiment. Anchor belonging in something that survives revision: how the group faces error, shares credit, and rebuilds after being wrong. Confuse those jobs, and every correction becomes a civil war.