Protagonist narratives and the Giovanni Drogo pattern

There is nothing inherently wrong with occupying the role of a protagonist. In fact, it is often an efficient cognitive posture: alignment around a core idea, an institution, or a shared mission reduces entropy and simplifies decision-making. In both personal trajectories and organizations, this stance can be locally optimal. But local payoff does not imply positive expected value over time.

The Giovanni Drogo pattern, as depicted in The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati and later discussed by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan (“Antechamber of Hope”), captures this dynamic precisely. A fortified position can serve as a stabilizing structure, one that absorbs uncertainty, provides identity, and allows for recovery. Yet fortresses are ambiguous assets: they protect, but they also delay motion.

Such environments often persist through multiple cycles, periods of expansion and contraction, optimism and retrenchment while maintaining the promise of an eventual inflection point. Participants come and go; the structure remains. Maintenance replaces progress. Vigilance substitutes for movement. The expected breakthrough is always positioned just beyond the horizon.

Eventually, the convexity changes. What once offered asymmetric upside flattens into neutrality. At that point, remaining is no longer a bet on opportunity but a bet against variance. The fortress has served its function; its continued occupation becomes a form of inertia rather than strategy.

Exiting such a structure whether an industry, institution, or role rarely comes with clean signals. There is no Kelly-optimal sizing for career transitions. The move is underdetermined by data and overdetermined by timing. Yet there is a different form of leverage at work: exposure to new systems, new people, and new constraints. These do not compound linearly, but they expand the probability surface.

The liminal phase that follows: undefined, unlabelled, unstable is where variance re-enters the system. Outcomes are no longer capped, but neither are they guaranteed. This is the domain where information density increases and where genuine novelty becomes possible. For better or worse, this is where trajectories bend.

Fortresses are useful. They are not destinations. Stagnation begins when protection is mistaken for progress.