Everyone Thinks They’re Describing the Same Problem

Rashomon

In Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, four people describe the same event. A bandit sees a duel. A woman sees violation and shame. A dead man, speaking through a medium, sees betrayal. A woodcutter sees performance, cowardice, and human frailty where everyone else insists on certainty. Each account contradicts the others. Each narrator believes their version is truthful. And each version reveals as much about the speaker as the event itself. No one is fully lying. No one is fully reliable. The story fractures under the weight of perspective, memory, fear, pride, self-preservation, and incomplete information. By the end, the audience understands something unsettling: the event itself matters less than the collapse of shared interpretation.

Most organizations are far closer to this than they would like to admit.

Product, design, engineering, support, operations, and leadership can all move through the same event carrying entirely different understandings of what happened, why it happened, and who or what failed along the way. 

Recently, Tanarra described culture as relationship infrastructure: the invisible systems underneath how organizations communicate, collaborate, escalate risk, interpret feedback, and make decisions together.

Technical organizations experience this fracture constantly. Product, design, engineering, support, operations, and leadership can all move through the same event carrying entirely different understandings of what happened, why it happened, and where the failure actually lives.

They understand the strain intimately. They just rarely describe it using the same language. Most experience the breakdown operationally long before anyone names it culturally.

The Version Everyone Believes 

The launch meeting ends with apparent alignment. By the next morning, product has updated the roadmap, engineering is reopening architectural concerns, design is trying to understand which feedback still matters, and support is quietly preparing for another spike in customer confusion.

Product believes the team adapted responsibly. The market shifted. Leadership needed responsiveness, not rigidity. The roadmap changed because the assumptions changed.

Engineering believes the launch started destabilizing weeks ago, when major decisions were made before technical feasibility was fully understood. Dependencies surfaced late. Concerns about architecture and delivery risk started getting interpreted as resistance instead of signal.

Design watches research findings slowly lose authority as timelines tighten. Feedback loops shorten. Review cycles become reactive. Everyone keeps using the word alignment while responding to materially different understandings of the product itself.

Support has been watching customer frustration accumulate for months across tickets, call summaries, and escalation trends. Nobody upstream ignored the signals maliciously. The organization simply stopped seeing the pattern as systemic because each team remained trapped inside its own operational perspective.

Leadership leaves believing communication broke down.

That phrase appears constantly inside struggling organizations. Communication breakdown. Alignment issue. Collaboration problem. The language becomes strangely bloodless. Structural strain gets flattened into abstraction until nobody can clearly describe where the failure actually lives anymore.

Nobody believes the system is failing. They believe other teams are becoming difficult. 

Product sees thrash. Engineering sees tech debt. Design sees the product becoming reactive. Support sees one fix causing a cascade of other problems. Leadership sees teams struggling to execute something that shouldn’t be this hard. 

Everyone believes they are describing the same problem. 

When this happens over and over again, leadership eventually calls in help. This is usually where the language around culture finally enters the conversation.

The Workarounds Holding Everything Together 

The conversation usually settles around the things people can see. Personalities. Process. Communication styles. Team dynamics. Meanwhile the deeper strain underneath the work remains largely untouched.

Over time, the strain stops living inside individual launches or projects. It settles into the connective tissue of the organization itself. Shared understanding weakens. Teams stop trusting that concerns will travel intact across functions. Official processes remain in place, but more and more of the real coordination work starts happening around them instead of through them. 

Senior engineers become institutional memory because documentation no longer reflects reality. Product managers spend more time translating executive ambiguity than shaping strategy. Designers absorb organizational and emotional friction because they sit at the intersection between customer experience and internal incoherence. Support teams build shadow systems to track recurring problems no official dashboard captures clearly enough to trigger action.

Highly capable people keep the organization operational by interpreting around it.

For a while, this can look like resilience. The roadmap still exists. Features still ship. More and more of the coordination work simply happens informally through trusted relationships, side conversations, memory, and the handful of people who know how to reconnect systems that no longer fit together cleanly on their own.

Then one of the people holding the system together leaves, or leadership changes, or the company reorganizes just as AI acceleration pushes operational speed beyond the organization’s ability to absorb the workarounds already holding everything together.  

The strain that once felt isolated starts surfacing everywhere at once.

AI is already intensifying this dynamic inside many technical organizations. Generated summaries sound decisive. Documentation expands instantly. Suddenly the organization is flooded with smoother, faster, more abundant language about the work. 

Shared understanding rarely improves at the same speed. 

The underlying disagreements remain stubbornly familiar, even as the surrounding language grows more polished. Now the organization simply has better language wrapped around the drift.

By the time someone finally calls these culture problems, the strain has usually been operational for years. Teams already feel it as delivery drag, recurring misunderstandings, political hesitation, workaround behavior, and the exhausting effort of keeping fragmented systems coherent through force of interpretation alone. 

They just call it something else.