February 2026, Issue 2: If You Need a Miracle, You Have a Leadership Problem
Hello from the Land of Perpetual Drizzle.
It’s a cold, rain-soaked stretch of early spring here in Seattle — the kind that reminds you the difference between endurance and design. In our last issue, Tanarra challenged the way organizations weaponize resilience, asking whether leaders want people who can tolerate broken systems longer — or systems that make resilience possible in the first place. That distinction matters.
Because this week’s piece is what happens when the answer is wrong. Hail Mary Culture explores workplaces that run on adrenaline and call it excellence — where chaos becomes identity, heroics become currency, and burnout becomes proof of commitment. It’s not a resilience problem. It’s a leadership and systems problem. As The Frequency continues to grow — with more leaders joining this conversation each month — we’ll keep examining both sides of that equation. Next issue, we return to the resilience series and unpack what leaders are actually accountable for building if they want resilience to be real, not rhetorical.
CRAFT CORNER
Mis en Place
In pastry school, I learned mise en place — because once you start, you cannot stop. Sugar doesn’t wait for you to find the flour.
I’ve run every major program of my career the same way. When the prep is real, you don’t need a miracle.
Hail Mary Culture
You can tell a lot about an organization by the stories it chooses to mythologize. Some tell stories of foresight, discipline, and long-arc investment. Others — far more common in American tech — tell stories of miracles.
Not the gentle kind. The last-second, bodies-on-the-floor kind.
Welcome to Hail Mary Culture, where crisis is not an exception but the operating system. Where the organization prides itself on “pulling it off” without ever asking why the play required a miracle in the first place. Where burnout isn’t a bug, but a badge of honor.
This isn’t a post about politics or personalities. It’s a post about behavior — the quiet, collective choreography of work that teaches people how much sacrifice is acceptable, whose time is expendable, and what gets rewarded.
And in Hail Mary Culture, one thing is clear:
It doesn’t matter who calls the play. Someone else always gets hit.
THE CULTURE THAT LIVES ON ADRENALINE AND CALLS IT EXCELLENCE
Most crisis cultures don’t see themselves as unhealthy. They don’t look in the mirror and say, “We operate on desperation.” They say things like:
“We just thrive under pressure.”
“We’re unstoppable when we lock in.”
“We do our best work in the eleventh hour.”
They say it with pride — as if survival is a commendable strategic plan.
And because they’ve been rewarded for pulling off miracles in the past, the system keeps looping:
Drift
Panic
Heroics
Collapse
Silence
Repeat
People inside the cycle don’t call it a crisis anymore. They call it work.
THE LEXICON OF A CRISIS ORGANIZATION
If you want to know whether an organization is running on adrenaline or strategy, listen to how people talk. Language is a cultural artifact — and in Hail Mary Culture, the words tell the truth long before leadership will.
Scrappy
This one is lethal precisely because it sounds cute. Scrappy is the organizational permission slip to ignore process, skip documentation, bypass planning, and “just get it done.”
As a behavior, scrappy can be charming. As a value, it is corrosive.
Scrappy-as-value means:
Planning is optional.
Sustainability is irrelevant.
Firefighting is identity, not emergency.
Structure is an obstacle.
If “scrappy” is on the wall, crisis is in the bloodstream.
“We’re building the plane while flying it.”
People laugh when they hear this — I never understood why.
If a pilot said it on an actual flight, you’d run for the emergency exit. But in tech, it’s celebrated as swagger: proof that the team is fearless, inventive, resilient.
No one wants to admit what it actually signals:
We didn’t plan. We didn’t scope. We didn’t resource. And now you’re going to fix it mid-air because we didn’t want to land long enough to make a real decision.
“We’ve got a real startup feel to how we get things done.”
In year two? Sure.
In year ten? That’s immaturity with a marketing gloss.
When a company calls itself a startup long after it stops being one, what they’re really saying is:
“We never built the scaffolding. We never learned discipline. And we are still, to this day, winging it.”
“This is where the magic happens.”
Nothing good ever comes after this sentence. Magic is the euphemism for unpaid labor, late-night heroics, emotional sacrifice, and the creative extraction of people who were never given the time or resources they needed.
Magic is a spell cast over the truth:
This is where you will save us from ourselves. Again.
“Bias for action.”
In its purest form, I’ll defend it. There’s nothing wrong with decisiveness.
But in a crisis culture, “bias for action” becomes code for:
Don’t slow us down.
Don’t ask questions.
Don’t request clarity.
Don’t surface risk.
Action becomes obedience. Speed becomes virtue. Judgment becomes inconvenient.
THE EMOTIONAL CONTRACT: COMPETITIVE SUFFERING
People think the emotional contract in crisis cultures is about grit or shared commitment. It’s not. It’s about competitive suffering.
Teams don’t compare accomplishments — they compare damage.
“You think that’s bad? Listen to what happened to me last night.”
“Oh, you only worked until midnight?”
“You should’ve seen the war room yesterday.”
Everyone is trying to win the misery Olympics because the culture has coded endurance as loyalty. The more wrecked you are, the more committed you appear.
And nobody pauses long enough to consider the metaphor itself:
In the trenches.
A place where visibility is punished. A place where speaking up is a risk. A place where the safest move is to keep your head down.
That isn’t collaboration. That’s survival.
WHO BENEFITS FROM ALL THIS? (HINT: NOT THE TEAM)
Crisis culture always has beneficiaries.
Two archetypes in particular thrive here:
1. The Visionary Who Overpromises and Then Absorbs None of the Blast Radius
They announce bold bets with glossy confidence.
If the team delivers — they did it.
If the team collapses — “you weren’t up to the vision.”
They surf on the team’s exhaustion. They are the heartbeat of the crisis.
2. The Brilliant, Overenthusiastic Team Who Accidentally Sets Themselves on Fire
This one is more tragic than villainous.
They start with reasonable deliverables. Then the creative dopamine hits:
“Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
“What if it also did…”
“We could make this even better…”
Suddenly the project is twice as big, and they’re too proud to admit it. They burn for beauty. They burn for excellence. They burn for the promise of potential.
And leadership quietly lets them.
In Hail Mary Culture, hope and hubris produce the same outcome.
THE SACRIFICIAL ECONOMY OF SUCCESS
Success depends entirely on where you sit and who you’re protecting.
Every project leader has a default survival instinct:
Protect the timeline at all cost → the team gets sacrificed.
Protect the customer at all cost → scope collapses, quality wavers.
Protect the product at all cost → deadlines die; morale cracks.
Protect the team at all cost → leadership turns on you.
Protect yourself at all cost → everyone else becomes collateral damage.
Protect leadership at all cost → truth and trust are the casualties.
No matter the flavor, one rule holds:
Success requires a sacrifice, and the person choosing what gets sacrificed is rarely the one who pays the cost.
THE RITUAL OF LEARNING NOTHING
When the crisis ends — when the product ships or the deadline limps across the finish line — leaders respond in one of two ways:
1. Celebrate the heroics and immediately ask for more
“You crushed it!”
“You delivered the impossible!”
“You proved what we’re capable of!”
The reward for the miracle is another miracle.
2. Say nothing at all
This is worse. Silence flattens the sacrifice. It tells the team their suffering wasn’t even notable.
Then comes the retrospective — the theater of improvement.
Lessons are named, nodded at, and quietly ignored. And sometimes you get the sneer:
“We call it a post-mortem… I mean, a retrospective, for those of you who are sensitive.”
If you want to know whether a culture intends to change, watch how it treats the person who names the problem.
THE EXILE OF THE TRUTH TELLER
Every crisis culture has a moral center — the one person who says, “This isn’t sustainable” out loud.
They are not celebrated. They are removed.
“Not a team player.”
“Negative energy.”
“Difficult.”
“Not aligned with the vision.”
The pariah is rarely wrong. They’re just inconvenient.
Their departure becomes the warning label everyone reads once and understands permanently:
Speak the truth and you lose your seat at the table.
THE OBSERVERS OUTSIDE THE BLAST RADIUS
People outside the crisis zone are often oblivious — not because they don’t care, but because they’re drowning too. Crisis culture creates bubbles of burnout.
Teams see smoke but don’t realize someone else is choking in it.
Even when it shows up in organizational health surveys — “unsustainable pace,” “low morale,” “lack of clarity” — the symptoms get misunderstood by those who’ve never lived the pattern.
You cannot recognize a war zone if you've only ever known office skirmishes.
THE EXIT: CELEBRATION, ENVY, CONTEMPT
When someone finally leaves — whether they jump or get pushed — something strange happens:
Inside, people congratulate them.
As if the person has escaped a sinking ship. Because they have.
There’s envy too.
The quiet thought:
“I could leave. I should leave.”
But identity and compensation trap far more people than loyalty ever does.
And then there’s the final defense: contempt.
“They couldn’t hack it.”
“They weren’t cut out for this pace.”
“They weren’t committed.”
Contempt is easier than introspection. Contempt is the cork sealing the bottle again.
Because when someone leaves, the culture absorbs the impact like nothing happened. No ripple. No pause. No change.
Just a quick reseal and another sprint to the edge.
THE TRUTH NO ONE WANTS TO ADMIT
Hail Mary Culture isn’t built on courage.
It’s built on avoidance.
It’s built on leaders who don’t make decisions early enough.
On teams who push for brilliance without boundaries.
On a system that rewards heroics more than health.
On language that valorizes chaos.
On a mythology that confuses survival for winning.
And here’s the part leaders need to hear — the sting of recognition:
If your organization consistently relies on miracles, it isn’t innovative. It’s irresponsible.
If your people are exhausted and proud of it, you haven’t built a high-performing team.
You’ve built a crisis cult.
And if you think “scrappy” is a value worth enshrining, then the system you’re protecting isn’t brave — it’s brittle.
The miracle was never the win.
The miracle was that your people kept showing up at all.
