If you want to see privilege at its most elegant, look at meritocracy. It is perhaps the most well-meaning myth in organizational life — the belief that talent rises naturally, that effort is the great equalizer, and that opportunity is distributed according to ability and drive. Meritocracy feels reassuring. It feels rational. It feels fair. It feels like the architecture we want to live in.

But the closer you get to it, the more it behaves like a story — a story designed to explain outcomes without examining the structure that shapes them.

It’s a wonderful story, really. It makes sense of success, reassures those who have done well, motivates those trying to do well, and gives leaders a clean conscience. But myths have power precisely because they feel true, not because they are.

And if the earlier conversations about comfort, architecture, and fragility have taught us anything, it is that the stories we rely on are often shaped by the structures we never question.

The Promise of Meritocracy — and the Problem with the Promise

Meritocracy promises that if you work hard, apply yourself, demonstrate talent, and contribute consistently, you will rise. It’s a compelling, almost irresistable promise because it affirms our efforts and gives us a sense of agency.

Unfortunately, research tells a different story.

Decades of workplace studies show that networks, early career sponsorship, access to coaching, exposure to senior leaders, informal endorsements, cultural fluency, unspoken norms, and even the perception of confidence often matter more than skill itself. And many of those advantages are distributed unevenly long before a résumé hits a hiring manager’s desk.

In one study, résumés with “standard” white-sounding names received significantly more callbacks than identical résumés with racialized names. Gender-coded performance reviews show that men are more likely to be described with potential, while women are described with precision — one is future promise, the other is present correctness. Workers with disabilities are routinely scored lower on nebulous metrics like “team fit,” even when performance measures match.

These discrepancies don’t mean organizations are malicious. It means the architecture is tilted.

Meritocracy assumes a level playing field where identity, background, language, body, time, and social capital do not influence outcomes. But the playing field was never level — it was graded long before we arrived.

An Organizational Story That Reveals the Cracks

A large company once launched a leadership development program that was supposed to identify “high potential” employees. The criteria were presented as objective: strategic thinking, communication excellence, adaptability, and leadership presence.

The first cohort: all men.

The second: almost identical.

The third: slightly more diverse, but still dominated by employees who already mirrored the existing leadership.

When asked about the pattern, executives pointed to “merit”.

But when facilitators observed the selection discussions, something else emerged. “Leadership presence” often meant speaking in a certain style — direct, assertive, unflinching. “Communication excellence” often meant speaking without an accent. “Strategic thinking” often meant echoing the mental models already trusted by senior leadership.

Talent wasn’t rising. Familiarity was. What the organization interpreted as merit was often simply the smooth alignment between a candidate’s comfort and the architecture’s design.

To their credit, the organization eventually acknowledged this. They revised the criteria, widened the definition of presence, re-trained assessors, and began asking themselves a radical question: Are we measuring talent, or are we measuring echoes of ourselves?

That was a turning point.

How Meritocracy Becomes a Shield for Privilege

Meritocracy is seductive because it explains disparities without implicating the system.

If a person rises, meritocracy says: They earned it. If a person struggles, meritocracy says: They didn’t work hard enough. If a group is underrepresented, meritocracy says: They aren’t applying, or the pipeline isn’t ready, or they need more confidence.

Meritocracy translates structural inequalities into personal narratives. It converts architectural features — doors, stairs, lighting, access — into individual triumphs or failures.

And because the myth is so socially acceptable, it becomes a shield for those who benefit most from the existing architecture. It allows those with unearned ease to interpret their comfort as neutral, their success as purely self-determined, and their advancement as proof of their moral and intellectual superiority.

Privilege loves meritocracy because meritocracy makes privilege invisible.

How the Myth Shapes Learning, Culture, and Strategy

If organizations cling to meritocracy without interrogating the system underneath, they risk designing for an imagined worker — someone unencumbered by caregiving, transportation, health challenges, financial precarity, uneven educational access, or the need to work in a second language through a workday.

Learning programs become calibrated to one learning style. Leadership expectations are built around one personality type. Rewards go to those who have the time, freedom, and networks to excel. Engagement surveys capture sentiment but not the weight each person carries.

The architecture reinforces itself.

Over time, culture becomes a collection of self-replicating rituals that advantage those already in sync with the system. Strategy becomes “the way we’ve always thought about things,” translated into slides with a more modern font.

And diversity becomes a numbers game, disconnected from whether the architecture actually changed.

Yup, Housing is All the Same!

Meritocracy reminds me of the old childhood belief that every house on the street was built at the same time. You look out the car window and think, Well, they’re all standing — so they must all be equal.

Then someone points out that one was built in the 1950s, another in the 1890s, one has been renovated twice, and one still has the original wiring. Same street, wildly different histories.

Meritocracy is the organizational version of assuming the houses are all the same age. We want to believe it because it’s tidy. But tidy rarely means true.

So What Do We Do Instead?

If we abandon the myth of meritocracy entirely, we risk swinging to the opposite extreme — assuming that effort never matters. That’s just as false, and just as unhelpful.

The goal isn't to throw merit out; it's to contextualize it. To recognize that talent and hard work are real, but they operate inside architecture — and the architecture matters.

What we need are leaders, designers, and organizations willing to ask:

• What part of this outcome was talent?
• What part was access?
• What part was cultural fluency?
• What part was familiarity?
• What part was unearned ease?
• And what part was a system quietly rewarding those shaped most like its architects?

These questions don’t undermine achievement. They illuminate it.

They make success more meaningful because it’s grounded in reality rather than myth.

Toward a More Honest Understanding of Merit

A truly equitable organization does not deny the existence of talent. It recognizes that talent is unevenly supported, unevenly recognized, and unevenly rewarded. It looks at its architecture with clear eyes and asks whether its hallways are wide enough, its lighting bright enough, its doors open enough for a broader range of brilliance to move through freely.

If we want to honour merit, we must repair the structure that shapes it. If we want to reward talent, we must redesign the systems that obscure it. If we want to believe in the fairness of outcomes, we must be willing to adjust the angles and beams that tilt the field.

Merit is real. Meritocracy, as we tell it, is not.

But with honesty, imagination, and a willingness to examine the architecture — we can build something far better than a myth. We can build a system where merit is not just a comforting story, but a shared reality.