Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm did what it does best. It noticed I’d been reading a steady diet of opera criticism and performance history and surfaced a book I almost certainly wouldn’t have found on my own: Deviant Opera by Axel Englund.

The book examines a set of contemporary opera productions that place sadomasochism—not metaphorically, but explicitly—at the center of their staging. Leather, domination, ritualized violence, power play. Englund’s argument is that these productions aren’t using S&M merely to shock audiences, and certainly not to please them; they’re using it as a lens to interrogate opera itself—its power structures, its gender dynamics, its historical entanglement with wealth, hierarchy, and control.

Once that lens is introduced, something else snaps into focus, which Englund makes explicit.

Opera already looks a lot like S&M.

Participants gather at a designated place. There are scripts that structure behavior. There is heightened theatricality, ritualized intensity, and often stylized violence. Women are frequently placed in positions of danger—but within a tightly controlled frame. There is screaming, surrender, excess. Preordained figures control what happens and how. And crucially, the fictional experience is cathartic precisely because the boundaries are carefully managed. Too much reality intrudes, and the spell breaks. Too little, and the experience becomes inert.

Once you see the parallel, an obvious question emerges: why do humans do this?

And then a more interesting one: when aren’t we doing this?

The illusion of neutrality

There’s a significant body of work—Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is the seminal text—arguing that human social interaction is theatrical. Not metaphorically, but structurally. People coordinate behavior via shared expectations, many of which are never articulated. “Front stage” / “back stage” behavior depends on tacit agreement. Breakdown occurs when someone violates the script without renegotiation.

Goffman makes clear that these scripts don’t feel like scripts; they feel like reality itself. And we participate in these collective fictions, on autopilot, in all group settings. We do this in churches, we do it in families.

And we absolutely do it at work.

Shortly after I finished reading Deviant Opera, I was discussing the book while complaining to a friend about a very mundane early pandemic frustration. Zoom had quickly become the default platform for video work calls, and it came with certain affordances—most notably, background images. A small mercy. 

But some people, loyal to Google’s ecosystem, started using Google Meet instead. Early on, Google Meet didn’t offer background images or blur. If someone dropped a Google Meet invite into your calendar, whatever careful boundary you’d constructed between your professional self and your private environment collapsed instantly.

I was venting about this when my friend said, casually: “Yeah, Google Meet isn’t my kink.”

His good joke landed immediately. A kink, unlike a fetish, isn’t about an object. It’s about a script. A patterned arrangement of roles, expectations, rules, and permissions that makes a particular experience tolerable, exciting, or workable. Calling out Google Meet not as a banal piece of work technology but as a script reframed the problem. Zoom supported an unstated script about professionalism and privacy that I’d consented to. Google Meet didn’t.

My friend’s insight named something we usually refuse to see. We pretend that environments like “the workplace” are neutral, rational, or purely functional. They aren’t. They are highly scripted social spaces that manage power, exposure, safety, and intensity. We collude with those scripts constantly, often without examining them beyond the employee handbook or work contract.

And when those unstated scripts change—when the rules shift without acknowledgment—we feel destabilized, without always knowing why.

Organizing energy—productively and unproductively

One of the most common—and costly—failures I see across organizations is not incompetence or bad intent. It’s unexamined script adherence. Teams enact inherited patterns of behavior because “this is how it’s done,” even when those patterns actively undermine the outcomes they say they want.

A familiar example: small organizations that throw themselves into service delivery without building infrastructure. They work in the business but not on the business. This insight was already banal when The E-Myth popularized it decades ago, and yet it persists. I’ve seen it in nonprofits, professional services firms, even venture capital firms—groups full of smart, reflective people who nonetheless keep reenacting the same pattern.

Why?

Because scripts are powerful. They feel safe. They come preloaded with meaning. And questioning them doesn’t just require strategic thinking—it requires tolerating the discomfort of stepping outside a shared fiction. It also carries the personal risk of being seen as deviant.

Many of the scripts we bring to work are ones we carry unconsciously from past group experiences—family and cultural backgrounds, good and bad places we’ve worked before. Some of those expectations are useful and relevant, others not. Often, the most powerful scripts come from implicit sector norms. Organizations that follow the slipstream of expectations prevalent in their sector avail themselves of the energy that comes from alignment with a dominant paradigm.

But then… there’s always a bit of extra energy living in the liminal zone just outside those carefully managed expectations. 

Distance without contempt

As a queer person born in the early 1970s, I learned early how to take scripts seriously without mistaking them for reality. I know how to show up, play the role, commit to shared values, and want a group to succeed on its own terms—while simultaneously understanding that we are participating in a social fiction.

That double awareness is not cynicism. It’s a survival skill.

It’s also central to my work. As a consultant and coach, I’m often paid to benignly violate the script: to dress slightly differently, react slightly differently, name things others have stopped seeing. I’m expected to participate sincerely while also holding enough distance to notice what’s being enforced and what’s being quietly disavowed.

When Ben Horowitz references rap in business writing, or when I reference opera—or, yes, BDSM—we’re not being clever for its own sake. We’re introducing adjacent scripts that destabilize the assumption that the dominant one is neutral, natural, or inevitable, revealing how its “official” version has been stabilized by excluding what doesn’t fit.

Taboo is powerful not because it shocks or scatters attention, but because it reveals where boundaries are being actively maintained.

Different stories, different endings

Unstated scripts are a powerful intervention site to improve organizational cognition. When you begin to ask yourself, your team, or your favorite “polished mirror” LLM chatbot:

• What script is actually running this place?
• What roles are rewarded or punished here?
• What forms of intensity are permitted, and which are taboo?
• Where is reality allowed to intrude, and where is it carefully excluded?
• Where do we give attention, and where do we dissociate?

—you start to see why certain initiatives stall, why certain conflicts repeat, why certain conversations drag, and why certain “obvious” solutions fail to get traction. 

Knowing this and naming this—gently, precisely, without contempt—is often the beginning of real change. Not because the script disappears. But because once the limits of the current story are clear, participation becomes a choice rather than an inevitability.

We can work on the script and in the script, together.