This article is an extended exploration of this Greek myth as sensemaker, first introduced in a previous article.
Odysseus’s ship has to pass through a narrow strait with a monster fixed to the rock on one side and a whirlpool churning on the other, and there is no way to avoid both. Historians and linguists alike believe this is the myth that gave English the phrase, “between a rock and a hard place.”
Circe has already warned Odysseus before he ever reaches the strait, “Sail wide of Charybdis, who will take the entire ship” if he drifts too close, and accept instead that Scylla will reach down from her cliff and take six of his men. Not none, not a couple, but six – an exact and named cost. A cost to be understood in advance and therefore not giving any room to surprises.
What the strait demands of a team, before setting sail on any journey, is naming that cost with the same precision Circe uses, and not to search for the clever ruse that tries to avoid paying anything. The strait does not offer a ‘free pass’ because it does not exist. Instead, what’s required is the discipline of stating, precisely, which loss is being accepted and how much of it. A resourcing call, a client the team should probably let go of, a capability it can only build by neglecting another or losing people to achieve it. The team that names ‘the six’ in advance is in a completely different position than the team that discovers, mid-crossing, that six people have simply vanished, without notice.
There’s a second thing the crossing asks of a team, which the strait doesn’t openly declare. Neither monster started out a monster. Scylla was once a nymph, admired by the sea god Glaucus, who asked the sorceress Circe for a potion to win her over. Circe wanted Glaucus for herself, and when he refused her, out of jealousy poisoned the cove where Scylla swam instead. Scylla emerged from the water to find her own legs replaced by a ring of ravening dogs. Charybdis, in one version of her story, was once a loyal daughter of Poseidon, punished by Zeus by transforming her into an insatiable whirlpool for taking her father’s side in a dispute over territory. Neither fact is evident from the deck of a ship sailing past. Both became what they are through someone else’s jealousy or someone else’s quarrel, not through any original fault of their own, and by the time a sailor meets either of them, their history has already been reduced to one frightening category: monster, and nothing else.
A department, a client, a colleague that has become the team’s own Scylla – difficult, reputationally fixed, blamed by default whenever something goes wrong – usually has an origin story too, and it is very rarely the story the team currently entertains. The person who seems intractably obstructive was likely burned once, by exactly the kind of decision the team is about to make again without noticing the pattern. This doesn’t mean every monster deserves rescuing mid-strait. It means the team’s account of how the monster got made is worth checking before it’s accepted as settled fact.
This fits how organisational life is described in the work of Stacey and Mowles. That is, some situations genuinely have no external solution waiting to be found, only local, and often costly, choices that have to be made and lived with, again and again, as circumstances shift.[4]
The strait doesn’t ever resolve. It gets navigated, one crossing at a time. And the choice of which side to sail closer to must be consciously re-enacted each time. However you crossed it last time has no bearing on how you cross it today.
One practice worth trying.
When a genuine trade-off surfaces, name the two costs explicitly, out loud, in the room, before choosing between them: not “we need to be efficient here” or “this means our team absorbs the extra load for two quarters.” Write down the number, or the name, that the softer language was quietly avoiding. Then ask a separate question: Does the strait’s current monster have a history the team has stopped examining? Could the resistance the team keeps encountering have begun before this crossing?
Naming the cost isn’t about making the choice feel worse so much as making sure the team consciously chooses it, rather than discovering afterward that it drifted toward whichever option looked least like a decision.
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Sources
Fry, S. (2024). Odyssey. Penguin/Michael Joseph.
Ovid. (1986). Metamorphoses (A. D. Melville, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Stacey, R. D., & Mowles, C. (2007). Strategic management and organisational dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations (5th ed.). Prentice Hall.
PG