A group of parents sat shifting uncomfortably on a set of splintering bleachers, all squinting toward a wooden stage that looked like it had been slapped together by someone who misunderstood the phrase “minimum viable product.” On the stage stood a phalanx of children dressed as Pilgrims, each one wearing the kind of aggressively wholesome smile that suggested a counselor had threatened them with extra chores if they didn’t radiate “big harvest energy.” Their costumes were crisp. Their posture was rigid. Their song—some upbeat hymn about corn or cooperation—rattled across the clearing with the brittle enthusiasm of a forced team-building exercise. Off to the right stood the other campers. These kids weren’t smiling. They were dressed in the cartoon-like approximations of Indigenous clothing that have haunted school plays for decades—the fringed vests, the fake feathers, the beads that looked like they came from an early-’90s clearance bin at Michaels. One of them, pale, braided, and profoundly unimpressed, watched the singing Pilgrims with the posture of someone mentally locating the exits.
The counselors hovered nearby in matching khaki outfits, smiling with the intensity of people who consider a “gratitude mindset” as part of their job description. One of them launched into a speech about the harmony between Pilgrims and Native Americans, delivered with the confidence of someone who had never questioned the version of history printed on a placemat. Halfway through the speech, the girl with the braids stepped forward. Her voice was calm in the same way ticking clocks are calm—quiet, steady, and the precursor to something structurally important happening. One unauthorized sentence later, a ripple moved through the audience. A counselor froze mid-gesture like an animatronic turkey whose batteries had died.
And then the pageant collapsed.
Ropes dropped in. Torches fired up. The “Indian” campers surged onto the stage with the coordination of a small but determined rebellion. Pilgrims fled. Props crashed. A cooked turkey took flight on a trajectory suggesting someone had launched it out of principle. Flames crawled across the plywood village like stagecraft gone rogue. By the time the smoke cleared, the counselors were tied to stakes, and several parents were clutching camcorders like flotation devices. What began as a cheerful pageant now looked like a historical reenactment staged by anarchists with a flair for dramatic timing.
Whenever I think about Thanksgiving, I think about this scene from Addams Family Values. If you haven’t seen it recently, it’s even more unhinged than you remember. It also turns out that it's a masterclass in leadership failure—the kind you see in workplaces, committees, game tables, and any group where someone in charge mistakes a performance for a system.
The cultural piece matters here, but only to the extent it reveals the leadership problem beneath it. Those faux-Indigenous costumes, the cheerful Pilgrim propaganda, the syrupy monologue about harmony—none of this was harmless, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has an excellent breakdown of how the Thanksgiving Myth was shaped and who it leaves out. These weren’t just bad wardrobe choices. They were shortcuts leaders take when they want a comforting symbol instead of a complicated truth. It’s the same impulse you see in workplaces that plaster the word “diversity” on a poster and call it a day, or managers who insist on celebrating a tradition without asking who gets flattened when they do. I’m not the guy anyone needs explaining Indigenous representation, but from a leadership angle, the dynamic is painfully familiar. When leaders choose a myth because it makes them comfortable, and then demand that everyone else perform that myth with cheerful enthusiasm, they aren’t leading. They’re curating. They’re protecting the story instead of the people. Wednesday didn’t rebel because she loved chaos. She rebelled because someone handed her a script and told her it represented harmony. Her refusal wasn’t sabotage; it was the system correcting itself.
This is exactly where Path–Goal Theory finally gets to shine. House argued that leaders exist to remove obstacles between people and the goal—to make the path clearer, cleaner, and more achievable. Leaders clarify direction, offer support, adapt their style, and clear away the junk that prevents people from doing meaningful work. The Grangers do none of that. They build obstacles. They build them out of myths and craft supplies and mandatory cheerfulness. The entire pageant is one long, glitter-coated roadblock. The costumes aren’t chosen, they’re assigned. The roles aren’t explored, they’re enforced. The narrative doesn’t invite meaning; it demands obedience. You can practically feel the kids suffocating under the weight of a story they were told to perform rather than understand.
In Path–Goal terms, the counselors aren’t clearing the path. They are the path. And the path is a narrow hallway lined with laminated rules and motivational slogans. They don’t want engagement. They want compliance. Compliance is always the first sign the leader has stopped leading and started choreographing. The kids can sense it. The audience can sense it. The only people who can’t are the ones holding the torches and calling it “tradition.” So when Wednesday steps forward, she isn’t derailing the path; she’s pointing out that the path never led anywhere real. Leaders who cling to tradition for tradition’s sake routinely forget that the goal is supposed to matter more than the route. The Grangers could have created a meaningful experience—an honest one, even a complicated one—but they chose the polished myth instead. And myths, as leadership strategies, are basically IKEA end tables glued together with stubbornness. They look fine until someone breathes on them.
Wednesday breathed on this one.
Once she steps off the script, everything that's been held together by pressure and politeness snaps. The kids don’t hesitate. They fall in behind her with the kind of coordinated enthusiasm that only comes from weeks of being told to smile harder. The Pilgrims stop performing. The faux-Indigenous campers stop pretending. The audience stops clapping. Meanwhile, the counselors keep reciting lines from their laminated script as if yelling the myth louder will make it real again. The whole moment is a miniature version of every brittle workplace you’ve ever seen: a leader clings to a story that stopped being true years ago, everyone else quietly knows it's nonsense, someone finally says the quiet part out loud, and the system folds like a paper canoe.
The rebellion isn’t chaos. It’s feedback. The fire isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. Researchers like Amy Edmondson have written extensively about how teams implode when honest feedback isn’t safe to give. And when leaders build systems that can’t tolerate honesty, they guarantee the honesty will arrive in a form they can’t control. Sometimes it’s a pointed question in a meeting. Sometimes it’s half the team quitting within three months of each other. Sometimes it’s a Thanksgiving pageant torching itself to the ground while a roasted turkey sails majestically through the smoke. But it’s always the same message: if your leadership requires people to pretend, it’s not leadership. It’s theater, and the performance collapses the second someone goes off script.
That’s the part that lingers for me every time I revisit this movie. It’s not the torches or the stakes or the parents clutching camcorders like flotation devices. It’s the shock on the adults’ faces when their pageant falls apart. Leaders who cling to myths always think the collapse came out of nowhere, as if the system had been working fine right up until the moment someone said the truth aloud. They never see the pressure building. They never see how many people have been sitting there holding their breath. They never see how fragile the structure has become. Wednesday didn’t destroy a functional system; she revealed that the system was already cracking.
So this Thanksgiving, whether you’re navigating family politics, workplace chaos, or the one player at your TTRPG table who’s about to do something you absolutely did not prepare for, take a lesson from Wednesday Addams. Don’t just stick mindlessly to the script. Instead, write a story that can handle the truth. If your system can survive honesty, it can survive anything. If it can’t, well, we’ve all seen what happens to the stage.
And hey—if you like leadership nonsense delivered through movies, role-playing games, and the occasional flaming turkey, I’m writing a book about all of this. Stick around. Things are only going to get weirder from here.