This article is an extended exploration of this Greek myth as sensemaker, first introduced in a previous article.
Apollo gives Cassandra the gift of true prophecy to win her love. She accepts the gift, then refuses him anyway. Furious, but unable to take back a gift a god has already given, since even gods can’t undo that, he layers it with something else instead: nobody will ever believe a word she says, however accurate it turns out to be. This is an important, if all too often ignored detail. The curse was never about her seeing wrongly. She sees perfectly. Everything she says is actually true, but it costs her exactly as much as if it weren’t. The curse is entirely social. It lives in people’s willingness to listen to her, not in the truth of what she’s saying.
She foresees the fall of Troy. She warns, specifically and repeatedly, against bringing the wooden horse inside the walls. She is right about both, in exact detail, and is ignored on both counts.
A contrarian voice is rarely wrong about the facts it’s raising. A dismissed warning usually fails not because it is flawed, but because the room refuses to hear it. It’s entirely inconvenient because acknowledging the truth of the warning would force the room to admit something uncomfortable and act on it before it’s ready. That’s the curse, restated in organisational terms: the accuracy is rarely in dispute, the willingness often is.
Where the myth gets harder to sit with, and what most retellings leave out, is what happens once Cassandra is finally, and completely, vindicated. After all, Troy falls exactly as she said it would.
A team that responds in hindsight with, “Well, they were right in the end,” as a form of justice for the person who raised it has missed a crucial point – the warning that arrives too early to be welcome and the warning that arrives too late to matter can be the exact same warning, said by the exact same person, with the exact same level of accuracy. The only thing that changed was whether the room was ready to hear it. Vindication doesn’t rewind the cost of not being believed at the time it mattered.
The myth provides one further twist most many of us never get to, because it’s easy to miss on a first read. Cassandra is taken as a war prize by Agamemnon after the fall she predicted, and killed alongside him not long after by his wife Clytemnestra, for reasons that have nothing to do with Cassandra at all. Even total, public vindication doesn’t buy her safety, prominence, or so much as a say in what happens to her next. She becomes collateral in a reckoning that was never about her. And this is the deeply unpleasant experience many of us have already suffered at some point in our working lives: being right, even completely and publicly right, doesn’t entitle anyone to protection from whatever comes next.
Bion’s account of group life describes how a team under sufficient anxiety falls into shared, often unconscious patterns of defence rather than facing the work in front of it, and a genuinely threatening piece of information is one of the most reliable triggers for exactly this kind of defensive retreat. The room doesn’t experience itself as refusing to hear Cassandra. It experiences itself as sensibly filtering out someone who’s being difficult, dramatic, or simply wrong. The defence is invisible from the inside, which is precisely what makes it a defence rather than a judgement.
Teams that treat Cassandra’s curse as a quaint old story tend to have their own subtler version running in their meetings. For example, the person whose warnings get noted politely and then filed away, and whose track record of being right eventually gets treated as a quirk of personality rather than as data. The question worth asking isn’t whether every team has a Cassandra, but to reflect honestly on whose warnings get brushed aside most frequently, and what it would actually cost to act on them now rather than wait for them to be proven right.
One practice worth trying.
At the end of any major decision, before moving on, ask each other directly, “Did anyone raise a concern about this that we didn’t fully explore, and why not?” Name the person if it helps, though naming isn’t the point, and relitigating the decision isn’t either. The point is building the habit of checking, in real time, whether the room’s confidence and the room’s evidence actually match, rather than waiting for the outcome to tell you which one was right.
A team that does this regularly starts to notice its own Cassandras before the walls crumple, not after. A team that doesn’t will keep discovering, with genuine surprise, that someone did in fact see this coming and did in fact say so, weeks or months before anyone was ready to listen.
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Sources
Aeschylus. (1975). The Oresteia (R. Fagles, Trans.). Wildwood house.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications
Fry, S. (2021). Troy: Our greatest story retold. Penguin/Michael Joseph.
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