Someone posted online this week about corporate team days, and within about forty comments it had become a proper catharsis session. The butcher’s paper. The coloured Post-its. Leadership doing their twelve minutes of performed empathy before quietly disappearing. The pre-assigned groups, because nothing accelerates team cohesion like being seated next to the person who replies-all to everything.

The OP nailed it: the barriers and opportunities written on that butcher’s paper are the same ones from five years ago. Nothing gets followed through. The paper gets photographed, uploaded somewhere, and dies quietly in a shared drive nobody visits.

There’s a particular kind of workplace theatre that never quite makes it into the onboarding materials. You learn it the hard way, usually while standing in a corridor holding a laptop, watching people who absolutely know what time it is pretend they don’t.

Someone posted about this recently and it landed with me. They had a room booked, a presentation to give, twenty people waiting. The room was occupied past the hour by a group of executives who had seen them, knew the time, and just… didn’t move. Eventually they knocked. The room cleared. And then, because the universe has a sense of humour, the executives complained about their attitude.