“We still reward candor.”
The slide advanced. No one objected. No one agreed either. A few people looked down at their laptops, which is what quiet disbelief looks like in a company meeting.
For six months, everyone had watched the opposite happen. The person who named the real problem got sidelined. The person who protected the story got promoted. The myth kept walking because saying it out loud carried a cost, and staying silent did not.
Then it collapsed all at once. One resignation note. One skipped meeting. Three honest conversations in a week. Suddenly the thing that had been “our culture” was just a sentence nobody could say with a straight face.
Bad organizational myths do not decay slowly. They persist socially, then fail publicly. If lived reality and the story have diverged, kill the story early. If not, the organization will wait until the legitimacy event is expensive.