The phone on the corner of the desk doesn’t ring so much as it vibrates through the wood, a low hum that feels like a threat. I’m staring at an email with the subject line: ‘Minutes from Yesterday’s Project Phoenix Debrief.’ I haven’t opened it yet. I don’t need to. I know what it will say, and I know what it will omit. The air in the room yesterday was thick enough to taste, a metallic tang of panic as Mark slammed his hand on the table-not hard, but with enough finality to make the projector screen flicker. He said, ‘This is a death march, and you’re all pretending it’s a parade.’
It’s something far more dangerous: a plausibly deniable, professionally sanitized revision of history written in real-time. It’s a ghost story where the ghosts are the ideas too inconvenient to be remembered.
For years, I believed this was a simple failure of courage. A symptom of a weak culture where people were afraid to write down what was actually said. I saw the person taking minutes as a sort of court stenographer, and I judged their output on its fidelity to the conversation. I was so wrong. I once made the colossal mistake of forwarding the minutes from a contentious budget meeting to my boss, thinking I was giving him an accurate summary. The minutes noted a ‘consensus’ on shifting 9% of our