Adrift
When the system you trusted stopped holding.
You never know what will trigger a true crisis of self. For me, the most destabilizing force turned out to be — somewhat ironically — myself. It unfolded through a series of events, each one exposing small cracks, until a final accumulation of stressors caused my entire operating system to fail.
Some of what broke it was professional. Some of it was structural. And one part of it was a loss I couldn’t explain or contain — the death of a close friend, by her own hand, in the middle of everything else. That loss is where this begins, and it’s why this exists at all. This was written to make sense of what happened. In a way, it is my tribute to her.
The only way I knew how to process any of it was the way I process everything. I looked for the patterns. I mapped what I could see. I tried to understand the system well enough to explain what it couldn’t contain. That process is what eventually produced these essays and accompanying framework — not as a professional exercise, but as the only form of sense-making available to me.
I started recognizing patterns and writing them out, then rewriting them, again and again. I applied the analysis to myself — testing my own constraints and assumptions across every context I could find, professionally and personally. What emerged was a model that held. It explained why I kept seeing the same patterns without consistent outcomes, and more importantly, what I had been missing and how understanding it changed how I think. This is the result.
Systems thinkers trust structure. If the system is sound, predictable outcomes follow. When they don’t, we don’t question ourselves first. We question the system, and most of the time, we’re right. We break down constraints and assumptions to get to the core of what drives behavior - incentives.
We go deep and wide, often surfacing real issues well before they’re obvious to others. Organizations are not often designed to absorb that kind of friction, and more often than not it gets reflected back on us. We are penalized for creating tension instead of recognized for identifying problems early. That never made sense to me. What made even less sense was that some people operating in the same way weren’t blamed at all – they were rewarded. I couldn’t explain it, but I saw it happening. The patterns for success were never consistent.
It was not neutral. Careers stalled. People left. Some of the strongest operators I knew disappeared from systems that couldn’t interpret them correctly. I told myself I understood why. I didn’t.
What I understand now is this: systems thinkers don’t lack capability, they lack anchors. Without that layer, the system doesn’t just fail. It assigns the failure to the wrong place. By anchors, I don’t mean values in the abstract or resilience in the motivational sense. I mean the people who translate and interpret what what’s seen and surfaced. I’ve come to realize that many of the hardest moments in my career weren’t caused by the system alone, but by the absence of that translation layer. Without a human anchor, you don’t just misread the system. You misread yourself inside it.
For years, I knew that the same patterns didn’t produce the same outcomes, and I couldn’t explain why. So I adjusted myself instead. Quietly at first. Then more deliberately. If the system wasn’t producing consistent results, the variable had to be me.
There’s a pattern that predates organizations, performance reviews, and management structures by centuries. A person sees something clearly. The system they live inside can’t receive what they’re seeing. The signal is correct. The structure is not designed to carry it. And the person who generated it pays the cost of that gap — sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their career, sometimes for the rest of their life.
Galileo is the most precise historical illustration of what that cost actually looks like — a systems thinker whose signal was correct, whose structure couldn’t receive it, and who paid the full price of that gap. His story has survived almost four centuries because it captures something people recognize immediately, regardless of whether they’ve ever looked through a telescope. The pattern he represents is not rare. It is everywhere. I call it the Galileo problem. And most of the people living it have no language for what’s happening to them.
What I experienced over the last several months finally gave me that language, but it did not feel like an explanation at the time. It felt like instability. It felt like everything I had trusted no longer held together in the way I thought it did.
What emerged later was not clarity so much as a wider way of interpreting the human system itself — one that could hold ambiguity, competing incentives, and inconsistency without collapsing into certainty every time pressure increased. That understanding came slowly, after the grief, piece by piece, from the foundation up.
The rebuild gave me a framework to explain something I had only been able to observe before. More importantly, it showed me how others like me, who have been struggling in the same ways, might be unlocked.
When you’re feeling constrained or blamed by the system just for being yourself, the conclusion feels obvious: the problem isn’t the work, it’s the system. And when the system can’t be repaired, the only rational choice is to leave. But if you’re wrong about where the failure actually is, leaving doesn’t solve it. In extreme cases, like my friend’s, it just moves the failure somewhere no one can reach it.
This isn’t because the problem follows you, it’s because the conditions that caused it are more common than you think. Systems without consistent anchors don’t just break. They misinterpret the people inside them.
And when that happens, the failure doesn’t stay where it started.