In Greek myth, Procrustes had a bed, and when travelers did not fit it, he forced them to fit exactly. If they were too short, he stretched them; if they were too tall, he cut off their limbs until they matched the length of the bed. The bed never adjusted to the person, the person was forced to adjust to the bed. That is why a Procrustean bed became a metaphor for forcing reality to match a fixed idea.
I think about this because it shows up in how we reason. We build models, beliefs, systems, and explanations to make sense of the world, and that structure is necessary. But the risk is that once we become too attached to a frame, we stop asking whether it still fits reality. In software engineering, this can happen when a team chooses an architecture too early and then forces every problem into it. The product may need something lightweight, but the team has already committed to microservices. The quiet shift happens when the question becomes less “What does this system need?” and more “How do we make this fit what we already decided?” That is when the model starts becoming the bed.
The same pattern can show up in strategy, hiring, product decisions, and even personal beliefs. A framework can help us think, but it can also protect us from seeing what is actually in front of us. Maybe the discipline is not to avoid models, but to keep them humble. Use them to understand reality, not to reshape reality until it becomes convenient.