Every so often, someone insists they’ve found Atlantis — a sunken city, a lost continent, a hidden civilization. The story just won’t die.

Plato’s original tale, written around 360 BCE, wasn’t meant as history. It was a metaphor: a powerful civilization brought to ruin by arrogance, corruption, and disconnection from balance. Yet thousands of years later, we’re still digging in the sand and dredging the ocean, looking for proof.

I don’t think Atlantis is real, as a place, but as a pattern.

• The Minoans had art, architecture, and seafaring dominance — until a volcanic eruption and tsunami erased them almost overnight.
• The city of Helike in Greece? One earthquake, one tsunami, and it vanished under the sea.
• Flood myths appear in every culture, reminders of how fragile “forever” really is.

Civilizations — and companies — don’t collapse because of one bad day. They collapse because of years of drift, denial, and disconnection… until one bad day makes it final.

This is the real Atlantis lesson:

Misalignment isn’t obvious until it’s catastrophic.

We see it in business all the time.

• Leaders ignore red flags.
• Teams stop talking.
• Success is assumed without systemic checks
• And the underlying structure weakens — not from a single break, but from patterns that repeat unchecked.

Then one “eruption” — a lost contract, a public misstep, a sudden economic shift — and it looks like everything fell apart overnight. But it didn’t. The unraveling was quiet.

As Donella Meadows warned through her work on systems:

• Problems rarely show up at the surface first — they build through reinforcing feedback loops, quietly compounding over time.
• Businesses that once thrived stop responding to change because they’ve drifted too far from their leverage points — the places where small, strategic shifts could have made a lasting difference.
• And just like in her Limits to Growth models, the real danger is not the shock event… it’s the refusal to recalibrate long before the limits are reached.

That’s why alignment work matters. Not just when things are broken. Alignment isn’t a cosmetic fix — it’s the early-warning system. Ignore it, and you won’t just get surprises – you’ll get collapse!

Strategic Prompt

Where in your business (or life) are you ignoring small signs of drift that could, over time, sink the whole ship?

If you’re seeing the cracks but not sure what’s underneath, let’s talk. A Clarity Conversation can help you surface what’s really misaligned — before it becomes your Atlantis.