THE RED WEDDING

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They promised you a feast. They dressed the table. They sent the invitation.

And then the music stopped.

On January 23rd, the God-Mother stood in front of hundreds of ITS staff and delivered the performance of her career. And I mean performance. Because none of it was real.

"No reduction in force. 1,300 staff will remain or increase."

"This is like trimming around the edges."

"You don't have to take an exam to keep your job."

Beautiful. Reassuring. Specific. And every single word, a lie.

Seventeen days. That's how long the promises lasted. Seventeen days before she sent eight directors into eight rooms with the same script, the same dead eyes, and the same instruction: read it, don't answer questions, log off.

In GoT, the Red Wedding was the moment the audience realised nobody was safe. The Starks were promised protection. They sat down to eat. Then the doors locked, the music changed, and every person they trusted turned on them.

Seventeen days. Not even three weeks. That has to be some kind of record for institutional betrayal, even by Westeros standards.

The Lie (With Receipts)

Let's be precise. Because words matter. Especially the ones she used on January 23rd and broke by February 9th.

She said: "Trimming around the edges."

Reality: Client Services across Westeros, gutted. Tech Adoption, functionally dismantled. Paris team, wiped. In ITSOE, one of the teams was made redundant in full. Every member. All of them. Except one. One person, quietly remapped to another team before the exercise. Same work. Different team. One gets a lifeboat. The rest get the ocean. If that's trimming, I'd hate to see a haircut.

She said: "No reduction in force."

Reality: Then explain why staff across the Citadel, King's Landing, and Braavos are requesting lawyer contacts through this blog's submission form. Using anonymous personal emails because they don't trust their work accounts. Pretending to work, smiling in meetings, dying inside. If there's no reduction, why are people being reduced? The God-Mother calls this "transformation." Staff call it what it is: a betrayal in business casual.

She said: "You don't have to take an exam to keep your job."

Reality: Across departments, staff were told positions had been reduced and they'd need to compete for what's left. Three roles for seven people. Two roles for five. In some cases, one position, two colleagues. Same team. Same skills. Same years of service. Decide among yourselves or go through assessment. People who covered for each other, who shared lunch, who worked side by side for years, now told to fight for chairs that someone removed while they weren't looking. Directors watched. HR shrugged.

That's not transformation. That's Squid Game with a Westeros email signature.

And the God-Mother said headcount would increase. So why couldn't they all stay? In every previous restructure at Westeros, it started with volunteers. Staff sat with managers and directors, talked through options, relocation, retraining. People were treated like human beings. This time? No volunteers. No conversations. Compete or leave. If you don't fit the spreadsheet, you're not a colleague. You're a rounding error.

And the roles they're competing for? They've hardcoded SAFe delivery accountabilities as permanent job titles. Product Owner. Scrum Master. Release Train Engineer. In SAFe, these are temporary hats you wear on a project, not career identities. That's like permanently renaming your accountant "Meeting Attendee" because they attend meetings. The people mandating SAFe on 1,300 staff don't understand the framework they're forcing on us.

Two colleagues. One position. One looked at the other, family in King's Landing, kids in school, and stepped aside. No director helped. No HR partner intervened. A staff member did what this entire transformation couldn't. Showed decency.

Submissions confirm staff in ITSR2 were relocated between countries, no competition, no posting, no transparency, in the weeks right before redundancies. Moved and protected. While others in the same situation got the blade. When some people are quietly saved and others are quietly eliminated, that's not a restructure. That's a guest list. And someone decided who was invited.

The Fifteen-Minute Funeral

A Friday afternoon calendar invite. Fifteen minutes. Monday 8 AM. No agenda. No context. Just enough to guarantee 1,300 families would spend the entire weekend in fear. The God-Mother's team had weeks to prepare. They chose maximum anxiety with minimum information. That's not carelessness. That's cruelty with a process document.

Monday morning. Eight departments. Same time. Same script.

The Merchant, ITSTO Director. Read it like an 8th grader presenting a book report on a book he didn't read. Struggled with the words. Someone else's words. Five minutes. Disconnected. His staff sat there wondering if the meeting had crashed. It hadn't. That was the whole thing. Five minutes to end careers that took decades to build. Nobody in ITS, not staff, not peers, not the cleaning crew, can explain how this man became a director. He is furniture with a calendar invite.

The Fake Sultan, ITSOE Director. Eight minutes. Script. Gone. And here's the punchline. One of his teams was wiped out. Every member made redundant. His people. His responsibility. Staff confirm he doesn't understand how Westeros works. Doesn't ask about clients. Doesn't ask about risks. Walks in, says "AI" three times, and walks out having contributed nothing. His town hall was called "an absolute disaster." And this is the man who helped decide which staff fit the new architecture. A director who would fail a basic quiz on Westeros operations was matching other people's careers to roles. That's not irony. That's malpractice.

The Oceanic King, Data Director. His department took some of the heaviest cuts. The Data & AI team, gutted. Staff who built the data foundations of this institution, gone. And when it came to the follow-up meetings, the ones where HR sat down with individual staff to discuss redundancies, where people needed their director in the room, he wasn't there. Absent. Couldn't defend his people. Couldn't even show up while they were being told their careers were over. His portfolio has been bleeding for months. Staff losing their jobs not because they failed, because he did. Still has four managers. For what? To manage his absence?

The Step God-Mother, ITSBA Director. Cut the learning team. The people managing transformation learning and working with HR on psychological safety. The team whose job was to make this process humane, eliminated by the process. Staff who raised concerns in her department were the ones who lost their roles. And this is the director who gave Westeros "Associate Senior Software Engineer." You put the word that means junior in front of the word that means experienced and called it a title. Google uses I, II, III. Microsoft uses I, II, III. Amazon uses I, II, III. She used Associate Senior. The entire industry called. They want her to know she's created the first job title that argues with itself. The learning team cuts and the Associate titles tell the same story: judgment this institution cannot afford.

We handed our careers to people who have never earned our trust. The God-Mother's hires. Directors who treated the worst day of 1,300 people's lives like a calendar obligation. Who read a script, didn't take a question, and logged off before anyone could ask why. That's not leadership. That's absence with a title.

The Sultan spoke without a script. Used his own words. Explained the rationale. Made the room feel like adults were in charge. That's not exceptional. That's what every director should have done. But compared to what the others delivered, it stood out. His department didn't take cuts this round. The Master of Coin and the new OIS Director also came through without reductions. Three departments intact. Five in the firing line.

The Pattern

Now look at who was cut. Look very carefully.

Remember the AMA? January 23rd? Some staff spoke up. Asked uncomfortable questions. Challenged the God-Mother on the record. Pushed back on assessments, on promises, on process.

Brave people. In a room full of silence, they spoke.

Now look at who's holding redundancy letters.

I'll let you connect the dots. I'm hearing from enough of you to know the picture they form.

The people who raised their voices, in the AMA, in town halls, in transformation cafes, are disproportionately the ones who were shown the door. That's not restructuring. That's a hit list with a job architecture alibi. That's a message to everyone still here: speak up and you're next.

This process needs independent review. INT. EIJ. Not HR. Not the transformation team. Someone with no stake in the God-Mother's success needs to examine who was cut, who was saved, who was relocated, and why.

We still don't know how many were cut. Management won't say. No numbers published. No breakdown by department. Nothing. When an institution refuses to publish the numbers, it's because the numbers are the evidence.

To Those Above Her

To Mastercard. To the Managing Directors. To the Executive Directors. To everyone with the authority to act and the obligation to answer.

How. Much. Longer.

The Consent Form — designed to strip staff of employment protections. Killed because a blog exposed it. Not because leadership caught it.

The Skills Assessment — "two strikes and you're out." Reversed because staff revolted publicly. Not because HR intervened.

The Recruitment Process — cancelled for documented TOR irregularities. Reposted. Still under scrutiny.

The Directors — hired externally, couldn't answer a single question, couldn't name the staff whose careers they were ending. They read a script and logged off. A first-year analyst could have done better. That's not a director. That's a voicemail with a salary.

The Manager Recruitment — flagged, cancelled, restarted. Incumbents not even shortlisted.

SAFe — mandated across 1,300 staff. A framework the industry is abandoning. A framework Mastercard itself abandoned. Coaches now being quietly sent home because it doesn't work. Millions spent.

The AMA — seventeen days between "no reductions" and mass redundancies. On the record. Hundreds of witnesses.

The Redundancy Process — staff who questioned the process disproportionately targeted. Favourites relocated without competition. Fifteen-minute meetings with no Q&A to deliver career-ending news.

The Flipflops — saying one thing in the AMA, doing the opposite before the month ends. Promising psychological safety while building a kingdom of fear. Consistently. Repeatedly. On the record.

Her business clients across Westeros know how badly ITS is being led. This blog exists because she destroyed every legitimate channel for feedback. 115,000+ reads across 137 countries. That's not a disgruntled employee. That's an institutional indictment.

A crisis report, 240+ staff submissions, 500+ comments, has been delivered. Six copies. To the offices mandated to act. Received. Acknowledged. Lawyers are engaged. INT and EIJ have the evidence. Investigation has started.

The question is no longer whether there's a problem. The question is how long you plan to watch.

Winter Is Coming (For Her)

She once stood in a town hall and recommended Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a book about how leaders destroy teams through absence of trust, fear of conflict, and avoidance of accountability. She told us to read it. Then she became its case study. Every dysfunction Lencioni warns against, she manufactured from scratch.

She'll update LinkedIn when she goes. "Led a transformation at a major international institution." Keynotes will be referenced. Applause will be mentioned.

What won't be mentioned: the Red Wedding. The broken promises. The 15-minute funerals. The colleagues told to fight each other. The consent form. The retaliation. The ASS Architects.

Mastercard hired her. She brought SAFe and spent millions proving what companies like Capital One already learned for free. The SAFe coaches are being sent home this month. Quietly. No announcement. If it worked, why are they leaving?

She will be remembered as the most unpopular, untrusted, and destructive leader Westeros has ever had. Not because she restructured. Because she lied about it first. And because of how she did it.

I hope this blog follows her everywhere she goes. Every interview. Every keynote. Every new employer who Googles her name and finds this page and 137 countries worth of evidence. The internet doesn't forget. Neither do we.

To Those Still Here

The form submissions this week tell the story better than I can. Staff writing in from anonymous personal emails because they don't trust their work accounts anymore. People who gave this institution a decade or more, now asking for lawyer contacts through a blog. Think about that. A blog. Because every internal channel failed them.

One wrote: "I don't recognise this place anymore."

Another: "I just need someone to acknowledge what happened to us."

And another: "I am a leading expert in my niche field. I realized that none of the reasons that brought me to Westeros were still relevant. I will be leaving in a few months and I already have offers from better run organizations."

Three people. One doesn't recognise the institution. One just wants to be heard. One is already packing. These aren't disgruntled employees. These are people who built this place. And the transformation is either pushing them out or driving them away. Both end the same way. Westeros loses.

I will keep writing. But I need something from you.

It's not over. Every role you've been mapped to comes with tagged skills. SAFe skills. Skills you may not have, didn't ask for, and never needed for the work you've been doing for years. Those tags aren't labels. They're future assessment criteria. And when that assessment comes, and it will, those tags become the documented reason to remove you. The architecture isn't a one-time restructure. It's a reusable machine. You feed it roles, you feed it skills, and it generates exits on demand. More waves are coming. If you think you're safe because you got a mapping email, ask the people who got titles on Monday and redundancy by Wednesday.

If you were affected, file with INT and EIJ. The crisis report gives them the big picture. Your individual filing gives them your case. One complaint is a grievance. Fifty complaints about the same patterns is an institutional investigation they cannot refuse.

Do not sign the MAS agreement. Not out of emotion. Out of principle. If a collective legal case is brought and a ruling is made in favour of staff, anyone who has already signed a Mutual Agreement on Separation cannot benefit from that outcome. You will have settled before the fight was won. Staff are already organising to engage as a group with legal representation. If you want to join that effort, submit through the form and indicate your interest. There is strength in numbers. They know it. Now so do you.

If you kept a role, your colleague who lost theirs needs you now. Not next month. Now. Submit what you witnessed through the form. Talk to your Staff Association representative. Don't wait for the next wave to hit before you realise you should have stood with them when it hit theirs.

The people who were cut gave this institution years. They trained you. They covered for you when you were on leave. They picked up the phone at 2 AM when production went down. They are not "rounding errors." They are not "unmapped positions." They are your colleagues. And they need you to stop being relieved and start being loud.

📝 Submit your experience: Form Link

The location trap, where declining a role in another country costs your severance, file with PRS immediately.

The Red Wedding broke the Starks. It didn't end the story.

They rebuilt. They came back. They remembered everything.

So will we.

P.S. Merchant, five minutes. They gave you years. When the 360 review comes, yours is first. Though we might need to read it to you.

P.P.S. Fake Sultan, one of your teams was wiped. Eight minutes. You know how SAFe has retrospectives where teams reflect on what went wrong? You are what went wrong. But don't worry. Maybe AI can fix it. You mention it enough.

P.P.P.S. Oceanic King, you didn't sit with your staff when HR delivered the news. You have four managers and a shrinking kingdom. At this rate you'll have more managers than staff by Post 12. Maybe one of them can attend on your behalf.

P.P.P.P.S. Sultan, you did what every director should have done on Monday. The Khaleesis did the same for years before you arrived. Think about that. You still have time.

P.P.P.P.P.S. To the ASS Architect, your sacrifice echoes across Westeros. May your career be ever ASS-piring. And to the ASS Engineer still arguing with his manager about which ASS he is, we salute your commitment to ASS-ignment clarity.

Stop doing dumb things and I'll stop writing about them.

~ The Chronicler

We Are ITS.