Look, you worked hard. You stayed late. You shipped that thing nobody else could ship. You earned every single promotion, every bit of recognition, every seat at the table. It was all you. 100%. No asterisks. No footnotes. Definitely no luck involved.
Right?
You send a Slack message to another team. It's a reasonable request — a small API change, maybe a code review, maybe just a question about how their service handles edge cases. You write it clearly. You tag the right person. You even add a polite emoji. And then... nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment. Just the quiet hum of a message marked as read and promptly ignored.
You're not being ghosted because they're bad people. You're being ghosted because the game they're playing rewards ignoring you.
This isn't a people problem. It's a math problem.
You've seen it. Every team is shipping. Every sprint has velocity. Dashboards are green. And yet somehow, the organisation feels slower than it should. Everyone's busy, but nothing moves faster.
Here's a clue from an unexpected place.
Picture a motorway at rush hour. Every driver is making the smartest choice for themselves — fastest lane, shortest route, optimal speed. Nobody's doing anything wrong. And yet the whole system grinds to a halt. More cars, more rational decisions, more gridlock.
This isn't a failure of individual intelligence. It's a failure of coordination. Game theorists have a name for it — the Price of Anarchy — and it might be the most useful mental model for understanding what management actually is, when it matters, and when it doesn't.
"Most conversations happen above the waterline. Most meaning lives below it."
"Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." — Khalil Gibran
It never starts big.
It starts with a Tuesday evening. You come home tired. Your partner asks, "How was your day?" You say, "Fine." What you meant was: "Exhausting. I felt invisible in that meeting. I could use a hug." But "fine" was easier. Quicker. Safer.
Or it starts in a standup. Your lead asks, "Any blockers?" You say, "Nope, all good." What you meant was: "I've been stuck on this for two days and I don't want to look incompetent." But "all good" was safer. Faster. Less exposed.
One "fine" costs nothing. One "all good" costs nothing. But 365 of them? That's a year of someone living next to you and not knowing you. Or a year of your team thinking everything's on track when it isn't.
This is the daily drift — the tiny, almost invisible gap between what we say and what we mean, repeated so often it becomes the distance between two people who once understood each other without words.
A caveat before we go further: not every "fine" is a suppression. Sometimes it genuinely means fine. Sometimes it means "I don't have the energy to unpack this right now" — and that's a healthy boundary, not a failure. The drift happens when brevity becomes the default, when filtering stops being a choice and starts being the only mode.
Look, I get it. Someone at a conference said "InnerSource" and now Slack is buzzing — or is it Teams? Honestly, who can keep track anymore. People are sharing links to the InnerSource Commons, talking about "breaking down silos" and "cross-team collaboration" like they've discovered fire. Let me save you the trouble — here's why you should absolutely, categorically, never do InnerSource.