Ironclad

Corporate wisdom assumes everyone has the same amount to lose.

Which of your customer commitments are ironclad?

That’s what a director once asked me. We were in the middle of building a platform, structuring each partnership to solve a customer problem and advance the platform simultaneously, which meant both sides had to be ready with preparations before either could commit to anything firm. Neither side had completed the preliminaries, so nothing was locked in yet. I replied honestly.

Silence.

A few weeks later I was left with half a team yet the same expectations.

What if everyone did it?

Imagine everyone in the organization taking the advice of popular corporate slogans literally. Universalize move fast and break things and you have a building site without a foreman. Universalize don’t ask for permission, beg for forgiveness and you have the same dynamic with a confessional bolted on, where the supply of forgiveness dries up as the request rate rises. Radiate intent fails because the noise floor goes up when everyone broadcasts their plans, so that no one reads anyone else’s signals anymore. The behaviour becomes indistinguishable from self-promotion, since only motive distinguishes them, and motive is invisible. Assume positive intent teaches an entire organization to extend goodwill unconditionally, which benefits whomever is least willing to reciprocate.

Every slogan assumes you are talking to a peer

These slogans were designed for symmetric relationships, in which both parties have the same information, the same power, and the same incentives. A peer who asks which of your commitments are ironclad is asking a coordination question: you can answer literally, because the cost of misjudging their intent is small. A director with the exact same words, at a moment when their pet project is short on engineers, is prospecting.

Assume positive intent instructs everyone to read the words and ignore the organizational structure, but meaning lives in the structure, and the slogan instructs you to disarm in situations where disarming is most expensive. The meaning and its consequences change when one side can convert candour into control.

Axelrod (1984) showed that conditional strategies reliably outperform unconditional cooperators in iterated games. Morozov and Feigel (2026) reinforced that notion: cooperation requires recognition, not indiscriminate goodwill. Uniform cooperation is therefore an exploitable strategy.

Yet the people who bear the cost rarely trace it back to the advice itself. When the less powerful party follows assume positive intent and is consequently exploited, the most common interpretation is “I misjudged this person” or “I lacked political awareness” or, most damagingly, “I should have known better.” So the advice circulates, endorsed by the people it does not hurt.

The threat of a fix

Most individual fixes require the contextual awareness that the asymmetry removes. The director who asked me which commitments were ironclad could have been forecasting capacity, evaluating my performance, wondering whether the team could accept more scope with a novel initiative, or looking for grounds to deprioritize the project. The space is large and legible only from above.

The structural fix is institutional: explicit resourcing conversations, documented commitments, processes that do not rely on people with less power correctly reading ambiguous questions from those who control their employment. These exist, they work, and they require organizational design rather than personal alertness. The problem is that the clarity that would protect the less powerful is the clarity that would constrain the more powerful. This is why these slogans continue to circulate and keep failing: they are individual solutions to institutional problems.

Universal asymmetry

Universalizing the slogans builds a workforce that won’t read between the lines, which is exactly the condition the powerful require to maintain the power imbalance. And opting out is punished: refusing to assume positive intent marks you as difficult or cynical, not radiating intent means you are too secretive, asking for permission labels you as too timid for the role, and refusing to move fast and break things makes you a cultural misfit. The people who have internalized them most deeply will police dissent on behalf of the powerful. The enforcement is lateral because it has to be: top-down surveillance would make the control visible, and visibility is what the slogans are designed to prevent.

Playing a different game

There’s only one question left to ask. Who won, and what was the fucking game anyway? David Percival, in Atomic Blonde(2017)

I had been playing one game and the director had been playing another the whole time. The question (i.e. which commitments are ironclad?) was a prospecting call, whereas I had answered a coordination question, and those are not the same question at all. The gap between them cost me half a team.

Naming what had happened cost the rest.