The Bed Nobody Tells You About

I've stood on both sides of the bed.

The one where I redrew someone's role and called it evolution, and watched them hear it along with everyone else. And years before, the one where my own role got redrawn two floors above me, in a meeting at a hotel I found out about from a calendar invite sent at 4.58pm for 9am the next morning.

Both times, the bed was already built. The measuring came after.

There's an old Greek story about a man called Procrustes who kept an inn on the road to Athens. He had one bed, and every traveller had to fit it exactly. Too tall, he took an axe to your legs. Too short, he stretched you on a rack. By his own account, a fair host - the same frame for everyone.

Nobody calls it Procrustes' bed. They call it the new structure. But it's the same iron frame, built first in a room you weren't in, and you're measured against it after - not for what you can do, but for how closely your shape matched one someone else had already decided on.

The story doesn't end with Procrustes, though. It ends with Theseus, refusing to lie down. He overpowers the innkeeper and does the one thing nobody had thought to do: puts Procrustes on his own bed. And here's the part usually left out - it didn't fit him either. He'd built it to flatter his own convenience, not to measure anything true. The moment he was stretched across it, it cut him as it had cut everyone else.

I've watched that happen inside companies too. Restructurings built around a genuine, unglamorous problem tend to survive contact with reality, because reality is where they started. The ones that don't are built around a story someone needed to be true - a new leader who needs a villain to have arrived and fixed, a board that needs a cost line to look like courage. Nobody argues, because nobody measured against the bed holds the axe. Eventually the bed measures the market, or that same leadership a year later and a frame built to flatter ambition fits reality no better than it fit anyone's legs.

That's the part nobody tells you in the town hall. Not how to fit. Whether fitting was ever the right question and whether whoever built the bed has checked if they'd survive lying on it themselves.