A few weeks ago I wrote about what I called the Dome of Bullshit. The response was overwhelming.
Teachers. Nurses. Public servants. Tradies. Council workers. Small business owners. Most simply said: “I know that dome.”
They knew the meetings. They knew the jargon. They knew the strategic plans nobody reads, the consultants explaining jobs to people already doing them, and the strange organisational belief that looking competent is often more important than actually being competent.
What surprised me most was how quickly people started telling me stories. Not stories about organisations. Stories about the people living underneath the dome. Because every workplace has them.
There is a point in almost every modern workplace where reality and presentation drift so far apart that the entire organisation begins operating inside the Dome of Bullshit. From the outside everything appears polished and strategic. Underneath sits organised chaos held together by caffeine, panic and one woman named Cheryl who has not had a proper lunch break since 2014.
Under the dome, looking competent matters more than being competent. And once you recognise it, you cannot unsee it.
Michelle the Teacher sits through a two-hour seminar titled Reimagining Contemporary Pedagogical Engagement Through Student-Centred Differentiation Pathways before going home to mark assignments until midnight.
Jane the Nurse completes a mandatory online wellbeing module reminding staff to “prioritise self-care” immediately before beginning a twelve-hour shift covering fourteen patients, two aggressive relatives and a printer jammed since Easter. Failure to complete the module may result in disciplinary action.
Cheryl from Administration quietly keeps the entire organisation functioning because she is the only person who understands the filing system, the payroll process and why the photocopier only works if you kick the tray slightly to the left. Executives call her “administrative support” and pay her shit.
Greg from IT receives an urgent ticket marked CRITICAL because the Deputy Executive Director cannot remember his password. The organisation’s entire cyber security strategy currently relies on Greg occasionally yelling: “Don’t click weird links!”
Dianne the Middle Manager spends most of the day translating executive nonsense into language normal humans can understand. “Leveraging strategic capability uplift opportunities” means Karen from accounts has quit and nobody knows how invoicing works anymore.
Jeremy the Future CEO arrives armed with a private school education, LinkedIn confidence and the firm belief that “the strategy of the business” is the single most important issue facing humanity, despite having never done the work the business exists to perform. Under the dome, jargon is not communication. It is camouflage. Jeremy has never met a buzzword he didn’t put in a PowerPoint. He is also usually the bottleneck for approvals because making an actual decision might create accountability. Meanwhile, Cheryl is quietly fixing the disaster he caused three weeks ago.
Emily the Graduate arrives carrying a new notebook and the genuinely touching belief that organisations are logical systems designed to achieve meaningful outcomes. By week three she has been delegated every task nobody else wanted to do since 2017. Around month six, the notebook grows less organised, the smile hollows out, and she starts using words like “bandwidth” without irony. A senior executive calls her “high potential”. This is not good news. The dome has noticed her.
Susan the Survivor has worked here long enough to remember when meetings ended with actual decisions. She survived four CEOs, six restructures and an agile transition. She stayed — not because she believed in the vision, but because the leave entitlements are decent and the job lets her pick the kids up at 3pm. Susan is completely aware the organisation is full of shit. She simply no longer has the energy to argue about it. She has perfected the thousand-yard stare during PowerPoint presentations and has been internally screaming since 2018.
Vanessa the Executive lives not underneath the dome but above it. She has not spoken to an employee below Level 7 since the pandemic. When morale collapses, she commissions a survey. When the survey confirms morale has collapsed, she commissions a consultant. When the consultant confirms morale has collapsed, she launches a wellbeing strategy. Nothing changes except the logo on the email footer. Vanessa eventually departs to pursue “new opportunities”. Her replacement arrives six months later and announces a bold new vision. The cycle begins again.
Somewhere in all of this, Cheryl has already identified the problem, Susan predicted it six months ago, Greg warned everybody in writing, and Jeremy is preparing a presentation explaining why nobody could have seen it coming.
And yet society somehow continues functioning. Not because the systems are efficient, but because millions of competent people quietly carry them on their backs every single day while senior leadership unveils another strategic vision document printed on environmentally sustainable cardstock.
Perhaps that is why Utopia and Fisk resonate so deeply with Australians. They are not really comedies. They are workplace induction videos.
Cheryl probably fixed them.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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