A 400-Year-Old Shipwreck Just Explained Why Your Project Is Doomed
On August 10, 1628, Sweden’s greatest warship sank twenty minutes into its maiden voyage. The Vasa wasn’t a project management failure — it was an incentive structure failure. The king wanted glory, the admiralty wanted favor, the shipwright wanted to keep his job. Everyone optimized rationally. The ship sank anyway. Every organization runs on the same dynamic.