The Rashomon Effect: When Competing Narratives Destroy Scale-Ups
When leadership teams carry different accounts of the same events, decisions stop being made on reality—and start being made on political capital.
Image: The Criterion Collection - Promotional Poster for Rashomon (1950). This article was first published on LinkedIn in May 2026.
Does your leadership team have a shared account of reality?
In 1950, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made a movie that instantly became a modern classic. Rashomon tells the story of a single event—a samurai's death—through 4 testimonies: the bandit who claims a fair duel, the wife who claims self-defence, the samurai's ghost who claims honour and the woodcutter who claims to have seen it all. Each account is vivid and convincing. Yet all contradict each other.
Nobody is lying. It’s just that all of us are is partial.
The Rashomon Effect
This happens everywhere. In couples, two people can carry very different accounts of the same fight. In politics, entire careers are built on narrative control. In scale-ups, the conditions are uniquely combustible: too young for solid governance, old enough for deep loyalties and deeper fault lines.
Why Scale-Ups Are Uniquely Vulnerable
It doesn't start with one person seizing control, but with pressure: a difficult quarter, stagnating growth. Each leader carrying a different account of what happened and why, aggravated by the conversations nobody's fully had. One founder blames faulty tech. Another traces it to that deal botched by Sales. The CFO saw it coming and feels unheard.
At first, this is just human and inevitable. But narratives don't stay neutral under pressure. They harden, recruit allies and reach the board in different versions. Suddenly the leadership team isn't disagreeing about strategy. They're fighting for whose reality survives.
In Rashomon, even the woodcutter—the supposedly neutral witness—is later revealed to have been motivated by his own agenda.
How Competing Narratives Harden Into Camps
The ending is usually one of two things, both of which I've seen play out in MT’s. A Mexican standoff: everyone armed, pointing at the other, the company paralysed at the moment it can least afford to be. Or scapegoating: one person absorbs the blame and gets pushed out. The problem remains, of course, as it was never really about them.
When competing narratives harden into camps, decisions stop being made on reality and start being made on political capital. By the time that becomes visible, the damage is already done.
The Solution Isn't Better Communication
The solution isn't better communication or a well-facilitated offsite. It's building the conditions in which competing narratives surface before they become weapons. Where difficult conversations happen before they become impossible ones, so that the person with the most power is not automatically the person with the most truth.
That capacity—to hold competing realities without needing one to win—is rare. At the moments that matter most, it might just be the thing that saves the team.
Our Growth Assessment surfaces these dynamics before they become visible and costly.
Laurie writes weekly insights on leadership and business building—drawn from art, myth and literature. Follow her or FABRIC on LinkedIn for more.
💌 Title: The Rashomon Effect in Leadership Teams
🎭 Inspiration: Rashomon (1950), dir. Akira Kurosawa
🎨 Photo: Promotional poster for Rashomon