Corporate Retreat: The Trust Fall That Broke a Window

It was day two of the company retreat. The lodge smelled like cedar, old coffee, and forced optimism. The leader was a man named Derek who wore a headset inside and called himself a 'culture architect.' He had us stand in a circle on the grass for the trust fall. There were fourteen of us, all in polo shirts the company had mailed ahead, each with a logo a little too small, like the company wasn't sure about us. The VP of Sales, a tall guy named Paul who'd been quiet all morning and kept checking his phone, climbed onto the small wooden platform. 'Ready,' he said, in the voice of a man who was not ready. We locked arms behind him, fourteen strangers in matching shirts, arms woven together in a way that felt more like a risk than a net. Derek counted down from three, very serious, like a man who'd done this a thousand times and never asked why. Paul fell. He fell a little left of where we were, maybe two feet, which doesn't sound like much until you watch a grown man in a puffy vest sail past your hands and through the big window behind us with a sound like a movie you didn't mean to watch. The glass was safety glass, the kind that falls apart in little cubes instead of sharp pieces, so Paul was fine — in body. He sat in a pile of shiny bits, blinking, not hurt, with one cube balanced on his knee like a small trophy. No one moved. A bird somewhere kept singing, not caring. Derek, headset still on, looked at Paul, looked at us, and said, dead serious, 'And what does that tell us about communication?' No one answered, because we were all still looking at the window, at the hole where the window had been, at Paul in the middle of it all like a king on a throne of broken glass. Paul stood up, brushed a cube off his vest, and said, 'I think it tells us the platform was off.' Derek nodded like that was deep and wrote something down. We moved on to the next thing, a card game about values I don't remember at all. I learned nothing about communication that day. But I learned that safety glass, when it breaks, sounds like a bag of ice dropped on tile, and that a company will spend any amount of money to avoid saying the word 'oops,' and that Paul is the bravest man I've ever met, because he stood up out of a pile of glass and said 'the platform was off' like it was someone else's fault.