Imagine, for a moment, that you work as a specialist in a global industry that touches nearly everyone's lives. Your role is to preserve a value who's definition is changing as generations come into and leave power. Your mission, in protecting this value, is one that is mostly at odds with your industry's express goals, and your role and that of your teammates mostly exist due to regulatory pressure. The people you work with and for are incredibly smart, mostly hopeful, but also cynical, distrustful, shrewd. Though they have won many battles, it often feels like, on the best days they stop, prevent, or fix things that could end up being terrible for the average person affected by this company's influence on the world. These victories feel good, but no one outside the close knit community of allies within the company ever hears of them. On the worst days, something you could have stopped makes the front page news, or even worse, allows for the tracking and killing of a journalist in hostile territory. These days that feel like defeat motivate everyone n the company. And there are times when it feels like you can't do enough to use a bad day to shift the needle, to change norms, to get everyone united around the idea that his should not happen again.

The company you work for trades in 100s of billions of dollars, has very few competitors in its niche market, and is increasingly viewed as infrastructure that other companies and even average people can't be a part of the world without. Despite the good days and the bad days that you can utilize to change behavior, the company is going to continue to grow and its business model, being almost antithetical to the value you are charged with protecting, is also one that seems built like a perpetual motion machine – that if we don't disturb it, it will just keep pouring out money.

Under these circumstances, it might seem totally reasonable to compare the situation you're in, fighting for this value against these odds, to be something like being aboard the titantic. There are many facets to this metaphor. It is a large ship, it takes time and distance to turn, to change direction. You know there are icebergs. Some around you say we have already hit and are taking on water, some are convinced that the ship can still be steered to safety. As with any such metaphor, many are rearranging deck chairs. In the early days of our work, we often championed subversive agendas, working together as pirates, our Jolly Rogers hidden in the shadow of the great ship. As our mission gained more visibility, it felt more complicated to choose battles that could be won, and that pirate flag was seen less and less.

The lead on your team, whose judgment and experience you respect, suggests that we know how the story must end, that there is no saving the ship, but that there is noble work to be done in getting passengers to lifeboats, in saving folks from drowning. When we were last in port, the manager of your team, your boss, suggested that the best use of our time was to mend those lifeboats, not focus on what's happening off ship, where our course was being plotted – more than that where the world was changing in reaction to the journey we were embarking on, new flags being risen, not for our work protecting that value, but for the might and unstoppability of the ship itself.

When the ship does start taking on water, and the need to save passengers begins to shift from a strategy to an imperative, you are there with your compatriots, getting folks into life boats, diving into the water with floatation devices, helping those treading get into a boat where they might be save in the shadow of this giant vessel whose path seems to have gone wrong. You suddenly see your lead's prophetic call to narrow the mission, give up on the ship, save the passengers. You embrace it. While getting someone who's drifted far away from the main contingent of boats into a throw ring that you'd already tied off to one of the larger lifeboats, so you know they'll be safe, you let them start pulling themselves in and you feel this undercurrent pulling you. It feels like a riptide, which you know only happen near a breakwall or harbor… even a rip current must be near a beach, and you get curious. This curiosity floods you, and though you know your mission is important, you let the current take you, and when it discharges you, you swim diagonally against where its current was.

You're far enough away from the sinking Titanic now and your colleagues, honorably and desperately trying to save its passengers to remind yourself that this was just a metaphor, and as you come closer to the beach that shouldn't be there if this metaphor were consistent, you try to put your feet toward the bottom, expecting to be too far out still, but eager to touch land. Would you be surprised if the water were only 3 feet deep? If you could dive under and look back to where the dramatic rescues were taking place, would it surprise you if the water didn't get much deeper than 3-4 feet? If the life boats were chained to the bottom? If the ship breaking apart, even the iceberg itself were motorized props?

Maybe this is still just metaphor, but what if you found out that the metaphor you'd believed in, fought for, sacrificed the core part of the value you were charged with protecting because of the clear imperative and need to save the passengers who were going to drown – what if you found out that metaphor was constructed on top of a deeper falsehood – not a lie. We don't call it a lie when we go to a theme park and enjoy the attractions. But when perspective shifts such that you can see the sacrifices you've been asked to make in service of some lesser evil only make sense in relation to the ground truth of the chosen metaphor – What do you do? When you see that the metaphor that was used to shift focus, motivate different action, different sacrifices, was not wrong per se – there is still water, there are still lifeboats, there is still a titanic that appears to be sinking – but was based in an assumption of reality that is itself fictional, practically parody – How do you react? When you see colleagues you love and respect making important sacrifices to do what they've been told is the "best we can do," them thinking that they're saving lives from a sinking ship when really they themselves are props, characters, playing out a drama that distracts from where the real mission might be. The value we were charged to protect is very real. I can't tell you yet whether the fight we should be engaged in should be with the theme park administration, or raising awareness of the dangers of being swept up in the reality of theme parks, or (more likely) with the powers that be outside the park, making sure they know and are adequately (technically) staffed to advocate for this value in a more serious way than for it to be part of a theme park narrative. I can't tell you because I've only just begun that journey of discovery. I'm only just leaving the park now.

I had imagined mutiny, and then when I saw things through this new perspective, executed it. The captain and the first mate should have seen what I saw, but they were too caught up in the drama of the story, alternately in their own interests that could be accomplished during "ride reset intervals" – the captain had set the rudder free so that he could play at being a deckhand again. The first mate was busy mixing drinks, trying to impress the admiralty. Before the riptide took me, I imagined I was a buoy, protecting the ship from shore. Once I could see our nearness to shore and what that shoreline actually looked like, I knew the buoy's job is also to protect the swimmer from getting out to where they might be in danger of being caught up in a ships wake, or caught up in a metaphor. Before I go out into the real world to see what we're really up against in protecting that value, if I can't find another way to invite my respected colleagues to join my mutiny, I will help them save these passengers before we're cast out to see, and then in whatever way I can, I would like to break this ship against the rocks, to destroy this metaphor and all that its done to misdirect, break this ship against the rocks, and see what's out there for Gods.