Why modern organizations keep building wooden airstrips and wondering why nothing lands
Richard Feynman once described cargo cult science:
people imitating the appearance of scientific rigor without the underlying physics.
Welcome to modern SaaS.
Somewhere along the way, organizations convinced themselves that clarity, coordination, and intelligence could be purchased as a subscription. If a high-performing team used Slack, Notion, Asana, Linear, Jira, Salesforce, or whatever’s trending this fiscal quarter, then surely we should too.
They weren’t copying the cause.They were copying the form. It’s pure cargo cult behavior.
1. The Rituals Look Right — The Reality Is Missing
High-functioning organizations succeed because they share:
context
meaning
models of reality
assumptions
vocabulary
tradeoffs
narrative coherence
SaaS tools encode the visible residue of those things:
tickets, tasks, comments, statuses, dashboards.
But the tools do not recreate the thing that made those artifacts meaningful in the first place.
Copying someone else’s Jira board is like building a bamboo control tower and expecting airplanes.
2. Tools Have Become a Substitute for Understanding
The industry quietly adopted a theology:
If we put the work into a tool, the tool will make the work make sense.
Which is absurd.
You don’t get shared understanding by clicking the same buttons.
You don’t get coherence by having the same fields.
You don’t get alignment by creating the same shapes.
A workflow diagram is not a worldview.
A ticket is not a thought
A dashboard is not a decision.
But we’ve built an entire economy around pretending they are.
3. SaaS Doesn’t Solve Coordination — It Disguises the Lack of It
If your team doesn’t share the same mental model of reality, no tool will save you. All SaaS does is distribute confusion more efficiently.
The ticketing system becomes a graveyard of forgotten context.
The CRM becomes a museum of half-truths.
The knowledge base becomes a landfill of orphan documents.
The project tracker becomes a motion machine with no direction.
We didn’t buy collaboration. We bought artifact generation at scale.
4. AI Will Make This Much Worse
AI doesn’t fix SaaS’s cargo cult problem. AI supercharges it. Because AI is brilliant at generating the appearance of understanding:
perfect summaries of misunderstood meetings
compelling documentation built on wrong assumptions
tasks that look right and are irrelevant
recommendations unmoored from context
AI creates the world’s most elegant wooden airplanes. It takes the cargo cult and turns it into an enterprise platform.
5. The Real Problem Isn’t the Tools — It’s the Belief System
SaaS assumes:
information is the bottleneck
documentation is memory
workflow is coordination
templates are meaning
data is understanding
None of those are true.
Most organizations don’t fail because they lack tools. They fail because they lack shared reality.
No SaaS vendor sells that — though many imply they do.
6. What Actually Matters Is Upstream of Every Tool
The thing that makes organizations work isn’t software. It’s the substrate beneath it:
shared models
shared language
shared assumptions
shared narratives
preserved reasoning
coherent context
If you have those, any tool works. If you don’t, no tool will.
Airplanes never landed on the cargo cult runways because the invisible system wasn’t there.
Neither is it in most SaaS deployments.
The uncomfortable question: What if the entire SaaS ecosystem is one giant cargo cult?
Thousands of companies replicating the artifacts of successful organizations, with none of the underlying physics —and wondering why nothing lands.