By the third month of Workshops on Alignment™, the Living Strategy™ showed signs of life only in its slogans. Dashboards once glowing with colour dimmed into beige. The Feedback Tracker™, Johnny’s “final gift” before departing on fellowship, was meant to display the pulse of the organisation in real time — but now its screens turned up only blanks, empty squares that flickered briefly before going dark.

It became a running joke: “The organisation has no feedback. Not even the machine can find it.”

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One by one, colleagues disappeared. Some retreated into Extended Reflective Recovery™; others simply never returned after “a few days of remote work.” Desks multiplied their empty chairs. Teams scheduled Alignment Check-ins only to find no quorum.

Meanwhile, the Committees of Questions™ refused to die. Having never received answers, they continued to circulate the same inquiries dressed in ever-new formats — each team inventing its own template to keep the questions alive. What began as a single list of concerns blossomed into a forest of matrices, colour-coded dashboards, and annotated spreadsheets, all repeating the same pleas in different costumes. One particularly ambitious unit even developed a Hexagonal Concern Mapping™ tool, complete with colour gradients and arrows that pointed back to themselves.

Officially, however, the headcount remained unchanged — as if absence itself could be administratively reclassified out of existence.

Ald scribbled: “Alignment: a geometry lesson without a compass. Bodies vanish; minutes remain.”

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Into this thinning field stepped Little Johnny — briefly returned from fellowship on “remote resonance.” His words, broadcast across Teams™, sounded brighter than the rooms receiving them:

“We are stronger together! We are aligned across all levels! Our values are our roots, our branches, our wings!” At that very moment, Lionbum made a cameo on screen, flashing a large bright smile and declaring with practiced cheer: “GO TEAM.”

On mute, faces stared blankly. One manager clapped; another yawned. The recording was later circulated under the title ‘Energy for Tomorrow,’ though the blank faces were carefully edited out.

I

Meanwhile, from another wing of SHOTE, the Staff Satisfaction Survey™ arrived. A well-meaning department, oblivious to the swamp of strategy, launched it with cheerful intent.

Lionbum and Ms. Blund’Er seized it as proof of engagement, sending nudges that multiplied daily: “Kindly complete the survey, it only takes 5 minutes!” “Your voice matters — nudge nudge!” “Reminder: you have not yet completed the survey. Please do so immediately.”

Each ignored nudge produced two more, until inboxes sagged under cascades of reminders. A few staff filled it in just to stop the flood. Most deleted them in silence.

HR promptly issued a glossy communiqué in Lionbum’s unmistakably leafy style: “Our roots are vibrant, our branches interwoven, and the orchard of SHOTE thrives with joy. Every smile in the survey blossoms into a thousand more! Staff morale is higher than ever, alignment has been achieved across the board, and our collective canopy shelters us all in harmony.” It came complete with stock photos of smiling colleagues who had long since vanished.

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Business As Usual (BAU™) — or at least the pantomime of it — limped on. Lucius still tried to animate his own team with forced cheer, orchestrating hollow rituals, and we may suppose the other team leaders attempted the same ritual elsewhere. But by then, staff were too drained, too resigned, even to muster the energy for gossip.

Late in one notorious session on Advanced Diagrammatic Harmonisation™ — a spinoff workshop devised to prove that all unanswered questions could be solved by drawing more shapes — Lucius insisted on one final chart. The exercise had already run for three hours, producing spirals, triangles, and something resembling a flying octopus, yet he demanded another round. Arrows pointed inward until the page itself seemed to collapse.

Ald muttered just loud enough for his neighbour to hear: “Alignment is a word stretched on a rack. Tortured until it screams, then paraded as insight.”

The neighbour stifled a laugh; Lucius thought it was agreement and drew another arrow.

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By then, SHOTE was less a Living Strategy™ than a wandering caravan, circling the same oasis with no water left. Fatigue became the organisation’s native tongue. Official communiqués still spoke of strength and unity, but the empty chairs told their own story. And as silence spread, one truth became harder to ignore:

The numbers were next — and they would not go quietly.