On August 10, 1628, Sweden’s greatest warship set sail. Twenty minutes later, it was at the bottom of Stockholm harbor.
The Vasa was supposed to be the crown jewel of King Gustavus Adolphus’s navy — 226 feet long, 64 guns, a floating monument to Swedish military ambition. It was also top-heavy, unstable, and fundamentally unseaworthy. It sank in front of thousands of spectators, taking 30 people with it.
You’ve seen this story play out. Maybe not with a warship. But with a product launch that collapsed under its own feature bloat. With a reorganization that created more silos than it removed. With a “strategic initiative” that everyone quietly knew was doomed but nobody said so until after the post-mortem.
The most spectacular failures don’t come from stupidity. They come from everyone doing exactly what they were incentivized to do.
Most analyses of the Vasa blame poor project management. The shipwright died mid-project. The king kept changing requirements. Nobody tested the stability. That’s all true, and it’s all surface-level.
Here’s what actually happened.
King Gustavus Adolphus wanted a warship that would announce Sweden as a European superpower. He kept escalating — more guns, a second gun deck, heavier ornamentation. The admiralty wanted to deliver on time and under budget. The shipwright (who died before the ship was finished) wanted to build something that wouldn’t get him fired.
Three players. Three incentive structures. One ship that no one actually wanted but everyone built.
When the king demands a second gun deck and the shipwright knows the hull can’t support it, what happens? The shipwright doesn’t push back — he has no incentive to. He optimizes for keeping his position. The admiralty doesn’t intervene — they’re optimizing for royal favor. The king doesn’t hear the structural concerns because nobody has an incentive to raise them.
When the king wants glory and the builder wants to keep his job, the ship gets heavier but the keel doesn’t get deeper.
This is the part that should make you uncomfortable: every organization runs on this exact dynamic. The CEO wants a “bold vision.” The VP wants to show alignment with that vision. The engineers want to not be the ones who say “this won’t work.” The product managers want to ship on the timeline that gets them promoted.
Nobody is stupid. Nobody is malicious. Everyone is optimizing rationally for their own incentive structure. And the collective output is a ship that sinks in twenty minutes.
The Vasa was raised from the harbor in 1961 — astonishingly well-preserved after 333 years in cold water. It’s now in a museum in Stockholm. If you visit, you’ll see a ship that is genuinely beautiful. The carvings are intricate. The scale is impressive. The engineering is, in many ways, sophisticated for its time.
It’s also a ship that couldn’t sail.
That’s the part most organizations miss. They look at their failed projects and see the equivalent of a beautiful ship with great craftsmanship. They blame the weather, the crew, the timing. They don’t look at the incentive structure that made the failure inevitable before the ship left dry dock.
The Vasa didn’t sink because nobody saw the problem. It sank because nobody was rewarded for saying it out loud.
The next time you’re in a project review and everyone is nodding along to a plan you know is top-heavy, ask yourself: who in this room has an incentive to say “this won’t float”? If the answer is nobody, you’re not in a project review. You’re watching a ship get built.
The Vasa sailed for twenty minutes. Your project might run longer than that. But if the incentive structures are the same, the outcome will be the same — just slower, and with a bigger budget.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just another way of saying 'communication is important'?
A: No. Communication doesn't fix incentive structures. You can have perfect transparency and still produce a Vasa if everyone's career incentives push toward over-building. The fix isn't better meetings — it's changing what people get rewarded for.
Q: So what should organizations actually do differently?
A: Create explicit incentives for saying 'this won't work.' Most organizations punish dissent. The ones that avoid Vasa moments reward it — publicly, financially, and structurally. If raising concerns doesn't help your career, people won't raise concerns.
Q: Isn't ambition good? Without big goals, nothing great gets built.
A: Ambition without structural constraints isn't ambition — it's delusion with a budget. The Vasa wasn't killed by too much ambition. It was killed by ambition that outran the organization's ability to say 'no.' Great achievements require the discipline to match vision with capability, not just the courage to dream big.