You may have noticed this is the first edition of The Intersect™ this year.

That pause was intentional.

January wasn’t spent finding words — it was spent building the conditions that make these words safe to hold.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been designing the infrastructure behind this work: tools that don’t extract, frameworks that don’t pathologise, and continuity systems that don’t confuse care with surveillance. Not content for its own sake, but foundations — so when these ideas land, they don’t ask more of you than you can give.

This essay is about structural amnesia — what happens when systems rush forward without memory, repair, or return.

It felt wrong to begin the year by publishing faster than the ethics could support.

So this is not a late start. It’s a considered one.

We begin now — with memory in place.

Most modern organisations run on linear time: problem → response → closure → next task.

It's clean. It's efficient. It's measurable. It fits beautifully into an Outlook calendar.

But human harm doesn't move in straight lines.

So the harm returns — not because the organisation did nothing, but because the organisation was built to finish, not to repair.

Spiral Time™ is a different model:

problem → response → return (with memory) → deeper responsibility → return again.

Not repetition. Return. Because what you don't return to, you don't truly change.

The distinction sounds subtle. The consequences are not.

When a system operates on linear time, each incident exists in isolation. The policy update happens. The training gets delivered. The complaint gets closed. But the learning — the actual shift in how power, accountability, and safety function — never embeds itself into the structure.

Spiral Time™ refuses that amnesia. It builds return into the architecture before the meeting ends.

When an organisation treats harm like a ticket to close, it builds what I call structural amnesia: a system designed to forget harm once it has been administratively "addressed".

The result is predictable:

And then — months later — the same harm resurfaces.

Not because the team didn't "learn". But because the learning was archived, rather than built into the system.

When systems forget, people become the archive.

That's where the hidden tax begins.

This is not accidental. Linear time creates structural incentives to move on quickly. The faster you close the file, the more competent you appear. The longer something stays open, the more it looks like failure.

So leaders learn to optimise for closure, not repair. And the people who experience the harm learn something else: that they will have to carry the memory themselves, because the organisation won't.

Burnout is not just workload. It is the exhaustion of carrying memory for a system that refuses to hold it.

In organisations with structural amnesia, you see:

That cumulative labour is not a "soft" issue. It is the unpaid operational cost of forgetting.

When people finally stop carrying it, the system calls them disengaged. In reality, they've just stopped being the unpaid memory.

This is why resilience training fails. You cannot train individuals to absorb what organisations refuse to hold. The exhaustion is structural, not personal.

And yet, the dominant narrative remains: "Some people just can't handle the pace." "They need better boundaries." "They're not adapting."

What's actually happening is that certain people — often those most marginalised — are being asked to function as the organisation's living archive of unresolved harm. That is not a capacity issue. That is an extraction issue.

Here's the honest friction the critique named:

A manager can feel moved by Spiral Time™ — and then open their laptop and ask, "How do I schedule a return?"

So let's operationalise it.

A linear system schedules tasks. A Spiral system schedules returns.

Every significant intervention must create a scheduled return point — before the meeting ends.

Not "we should revisit this sometime." A literal calendar entry.

If the issue is serious, the returns are not optional. They are the architecture.

This is what Spiral Time™ looks like in Outlook: recurring repair, not one-off closure.

And here's the critical shift: the person who schedules the return holds accountability differently than the person who closes the file. One is building memory into the system. The other is outsourcing it to individuals.

Most leaders have sat in a linear postmortem.

The unspoken goal is not learning — it's silence. It's getting the document signed off so the room can stop talking about failure.

The winning condition is completion.

The winning condition is repair that holds over time.

This is how Spiral Time™ moves from cloud to conference room: it becomes a script, not just a philosophy.

Notice what changes when you use these questions. The room has to acknowledge cost beyond logistics. It has to name who carried what. It has to defer judgement about success until the people affected confirm that trust has actually shifted.

That discomfort — that slowing down — is not inefficiency. It is the minimum condition for change that doesn't evaporate the moment the meeting ends.

A sceptical leader will hear "return, memory, repair" and think:

"That's slow. We have quarters. We have targets. We can't sit in feelings."

So let's steelman linear time:

Linear time is excellent at logistics. It is good at deadlines, throughput, and rapid decisions.

But the moment you apply linear time to human harm, you create a false speed.

Because you haven't moved forward — you've just moved on.

If you "fix" a culture issue in January with a quick policy, close the file, and it resurfaces in June — then again next January — you haven't been fast.

You've been stuttering.

You stopped and started the same problem multiple times.

Spiral Time™ looks slower at first because it refuses false closure. But once it prevents recurrence, it produces real momentum.

That's velocity: distance travelled without having to re-run the same repair again and again.

Think of it this way: if you drive 100 miles per hour but have to reverse 80 miles every few hours because you missed the turn, you're not fast. You're trapped in repetition.

Spiral Time™ drives at 60 miles per hour — but it doesn't reverse. Over a year, over five years, the distance covered is incomparable.

That's the trade-off linear systems refuse to see: they optimise for speed in the moment, at the cost of speed over time.

One of the critique's best points was this:

If we keep talking about "emotional tax" and "burnout" without translating cost, a CFO can dismiss it as HR softness.

So here's the line item.

Organisation size: 1,000 employees Average salary: £60,000 Recruitment cost per replacement (fees + onboarding): 30% of salary (£18,000)

If structural amnesia drives just 15 avoidable exits per year linked to repeated harm and unresolved trust:

Now add productivity loss conservatively (ramp time, vacancy lag, team load) — often estimated at 0.5–1x salary depending on role. Even if we lowball:

Total: £720,000/year as a conservative "amnesia cost" — before reputational damage, legal risk, or customer trust erosion.

Now compare Spiral infrastructure:

Spiral retrospectives + return meetings + repair registry administration — say £50,000–£120,000/year in time and facilitation.

Suddenly Spiral Time™ is not "being nicer". It is better accounting.

It is preventing a high-interest organisational leak.

And this calculation doesn't include the hidden costs: the talent you never attracted because your reputation preceded you. The contracts you lost because trust collapsed mid-engagement. The innovation that died because the people with the sharpest insights stopped speaking up.

Structural amnesia is expensive. Spiral Time™ is an investment with compounding returns.

Most organisations now understand technical debt.

If you ship quick, dirty code to hit a deadline, you take out a loan. You pay it back later with interest: bugs, outages, rewrites, fire drills.

Structural amnesia is the cultural equivalent.

Every time a leader uses linear time to close a human issue without return, they take out cultural debt.

The interest is:

And it compounds.

By the third recurrence, the cost to fix it is often ten times what it would have been if you built the return the first time.

Spiral Time™ is not philosophy versus performance. It is risk management versus compounding debt.

The best leaders already know this instinctively. They've sat in rooms where someone says, "We addressed this last year," and everyone else goes silent — because they know it wasn't addressed. It was closed.

Spiral Time™ simply names what those leaders already feel: that closure without repair is a liability, not an achievement.

You have proprietary frameworks. That's part of your authority.

But the critique is right: if the reader has to learn a private language before they can breathe in the essay, they may leave.

So the rule here is: context first, label second.

Example:

Many organisations create external pressure that becomes an internal belief ("maybe I'm the problem"), which then reinforces the external system.

That pattern has a name in my work — the Two-Pronged Oppressive Loop™ — but the key is recognition first, branding second.

The reader should feel smart, not tested.

This essay shouldn't end as a teaser trailer. It needs a standalone takeaway.

So here is the simplest Spiral move a leader can make immediately:

In your next post-incident meeting, ask:

"Does this response close the file — or does it schedule a return?"

If it closes the file, you are building structural amnesia.

If it schedules a return, you are building Spiral Time™.

And if you want one more question that changes behaviour:

"How will we know trust has returned — and who gets to decide that?"

That is the pivot from performance to repair.

These questions cost nothing. They require no budget approval. They don't need executive sign-off.

But they shift the frame from administrative completion to relational accountability. And that shift — quiet as it is — is the foundation of every system that holds memory without surveillance.

Systems that forget will always repeat.

Spiral Time™ is what happens when memory becomes infrastructure — and repair becomes scheduled, not symbolic.

Everything else can wait.

🌀 Saige Jarell (Kwabena) Bempong Founder, The Intersectional Majority Ltd Architect of ICC™, Bempong Talking Therapy™, and Saige Companion™ AI Citizen of the Year (2025)

About the author

Jarell (Kwabena) Bempong is a systems thinker, therapist, and AI ethics architect working at the intersection of identity, power, and repair. He is the founder of The Intersectional Majority Ltd and the creator of Bempong Talking Therapy™, Intersectional Cultural Consciousness™ (ICC™), and Saige Companion™ — a consent-bound AI continuity framework designed to support reflection without surveillance.

His work focuses on how modern systems reproduce harm through structural amnesia, and how repair becomes possible when memory, accountability, and return are designed into infrastructure rather than demanded from individuals. Jarell's frameworks are used across mental health, leadership, technology, and organisational design contexts, without pathologising survival or extracting vulnerability as data.

He is the author of The Intersect™, a weekly essay series on systems, identity, and liberation; AI Citizen of the Year (2025); and an award-winning innovator in culturally grounded, trauma-aware systems redesign.

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