This article is an extended exploration of this Greek myth as sensemaker, first introduced in a previous article.
In one version of his story, Prometheus is humanity’s own maker, shaping the first people out of clay and river water before he ever steals anything on their behalf. That’s an important and often overlooked detail, because it means what he does next isn’t rebellion for its own sake. When Zeus withholds fire from the people Prometheus made, Prometheus steals it anyway, hidden inside a fennel stalk, fully aware of what it will cost him personally. “No good deed goes unpunished” turns out to be a genuinely ancient complaint, not a modern one. Zeus’s punishment is exact and endless – chained to a rock, an eagle is sent to eat his liver every day. His liver regrows overnight so the same transgression can be punished again the next morning – and again, and again, ad infinitum.
But it turns out it wasn’t actually forever, in the end. Generations later, Heracles, wandering through the Caucasus on one of his own labours, kills the eagle and breaks the chains, and Zeus allows it, even lets it add to Heracles’s glory rather than treating it as further defiance. The release doesn’t come from Prometheus escaping or outlasting his punishment alone. It comes from someone else choosing to intervene on his behalf, long after the original transgression, at a time nobody foresaw.
Prometheus’s story should be treated seriously by teams for two separate reasons. The first is what a story about innovation usually leaves out. That is, the actual cost of change (progress, innovation, transformation – call it what you will), and who’s actually paying it. Most organisational accounts of disruption are edited the way Zeus’s version of events would be, if he told it. The benefit gets named in detail, but the casualties – the roles ‘restructured’ out from anyone deemed ‘redundant’, the team whose expertise stops mattering the moment a new capability lands – get left out entirely. Prometheus never gets to pretend the fire was free. Calling it “free” wouldn’t just be naïve; it would be denial disguised as naïveté. That’s much more disingenuous.
The second is about the eagle, and about Heracles. The person bearing the ongoing cost of a change the organisation decided to make doesn’t have to bear it alone indefinitely, and doesn’t have to be the one who ends it either. Someone else, later, with no direct stake in the original decision, can simply notice the cost is still being paid and act to end it. Maybe they aren’t obliged to do it, because it isn’t in their job descriptions, but it’s certainly an option. And a team that never asks who its ‘Heracles’ might be has mistakenly decided the cost must be carried forever, when the myth itself suggests otherwise.
This squares with how organisational life is described in the works of Stacey and Mowles. Transformation isn’t a variable an organisation manages from a safe distance, it’s something made from real, ongoing, and often unevenly distributed cost, carried by particular people rather than absorbed by the organisation as an abstraction. Naming who is currently chained to the rock does not mean concluding that nothing should have been stolen in the first place. It means refusing to tell the story as though no one is paying the price.
One practice worth trying.
When a change lands, ask openly, in the room, “Who is the closest thing we have to Prometheus here, and what exactly are they still paying for this?” Name it specifically rather than gesturing at “the team” generally. Then ask the harder question, “Is there anyone in a position to be this person’s Heracles, someone with the standing to notice the ongoing cost and actually do something about it, and has anyone actually asked them?”
The fire doesn’t get put back once it’s given. The question is not whether the theft was worth it, but whether those still paying the price must do so alone and forever simply because no one thought of doing something about the eagle.
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Sources
Fry, S. (2018). Mythos: The Greek myths retold. Penguin/Michael Joseph.
Hesiod. (1988). Theogony and Works and Days (M. L. West, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Stacey, R. D., & Mowles, C. (2016). Strategic management and organisational dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations (7th ed.). Pearson Education.
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