The Enterprise Myth

The Enterprise Myth

Every day, organisations bleed intelligence. Not through incompetence, but through structure. Hierarchical authority—the system we’ve inherited from the industrial age—was built for control, not truth. It rewards confidence over competence, suppresses dissent, and creates leaders who are certain but wrong more often than they are curious and correct.

The Enterprise Myth exposes the hidden failures of corporate hierarchy at a moment when the intelligence age demands something radically different. Drawing on history, neuroscience, complexity science, and live demonstrations from Luminary AI—one of the world’s first constitutionally governed enterprises—Steve Butler shows why hierarchy is not just inefficient, but epistemically broken.

From the Challenger disaster to the 2008 financial collapse, from stalled innovation pipelines to disengaged employees, the evidence is overwhelming: when authority trumps opposition, organisations drift, collapse, and pollute their own decision-making. The very structures designed to coordinate people now systematically destroy collective intelligence.

But this book is not just critique—it is prescription. Butler introduces the alternative: constitutional governance. By embedding systematic opposition, transparency, and verification into enterprise architecture, organisations can unlock distributed intelligence that outperforms any hierarchy. Using frameworks such as PACED, TACED, and ARG, and operational proof from Luminary AI’s neural governance system, he demonstrates how businesses can:

• Replace “certainty theatre” with traceable, auditable reasoning.

• Transform innovation from fragile sparks into sustainable, distributed capability.

• Protect against drift, collapse, and pollution—the three great failure vectors of enterprise.

• Harness synthetic intelligence through governed collaboration, not unchecked autonomy.

The Enterprise Myth sits at the heart of the Illusion Wars Trilogy, between The Reality Paradox (on the collapse of shared truth in the AI age) and The AI Myth (on the dangers of autonomous AI). Where The Reality Paradox shows why truth itself is under siege, and The AI Myth dismantles the fantasy of intelligent autonomy, The Enterprise Myth targets the corporate structures that amplify both illusions. Together, these volumes provide a complete constitutional framework for surviving the intelligence age.

For executives, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and anyone frustrated by the failures of modern institutions, this book offers both a warning and a blueprint. The intelligence age will not reward organisations that cling to hierarchy. It will reward those bold enough to build enterprises governed by truth, opposition, and constitutional design.

The question is not whether hierarchy is broken. The question is whether we will replace it before it replaces us.