The fastest way to poison candor is to stage it before the group can bear it.
A meeting can be made to look rigorous: the no-blame covenant, the hard questions, the facilitator, the postmortem deck. From the outside, it reads as maturity.
But if the last junior person who contradicted a senior one paid for it later, the ritual is a trap. People learn the real rule immediately: vulnerability is requested in public and punished in private. After that, the form remains and the truth leaves. What is left is management theater with better vocabulary.
This is why the catechumenate comes before the high-heat rite. Lower-stakes coordination. Shared meals. Small promises kept. Enough lived evidence that the group can survive an honest sentence.
Do not confuse ritual form with readiness. Before the big reckoning, ask one hard question: when was the last time someone told an expensive truth here and nothing bad happened to them?