It's 9:47 PM on October 26th. The house is quiet. Marcus Chen is sitting at his kitchen table with a glass of something Scottish and a PDF he's been avoiding for three days.
Twenty-eight pages. "Lessons Learnt before the fact, not after."
He's read consultant white papers before. He knows the genre. Big promises. Vague methodology. A call to action that somehow always requires signing something expensive.
But Sarah's face after the all hands meeting keeps haunting him. The way she said ‘burnout’, almost casually, but like she was confessing to a crime. His silence that followed, and realising he needed to act somehow.
So here he is. Giving himself a pathway to act.
He opens the PDF.
"You're going to learn the truth eventually. The only variable is the price."
Marcus snorts. Bold. Slightly arrogant. The kind of thing a consultant says when they want to sound like they've seen it all.
But.
He thinks about the ECC implementation ten years ago. The production line stalled. The month of Hypercare firefighting. The invoice that kept growing.
They learned the truth eventually.
The price was memorable for the wrong reasons.
He keeps reading.
The white paper describes a future Lessons Learnt session. Tense room. Overspent budget. Slipped timeline.
"Someone will say, 'We should have addressed governance earlier.' Someone else will say, 'We should have understood our non-clean-core dependencies before we started.' Everyone will nod. Someone will take notes. The document will get filed."
Marcus has been in that room. Multiple times. Different projects, same conversation. The notes get taken. The document gets filed. Nothing changes for the next project.