The Mushroom Tapes: What Shared Experience Teaches Project Leaders

I listened to The Mushroom trial as many people did: caught between curiosity and discomfort.

Like others, I wanted to understand why. And I was uneasy about my own wanting-to-know, aware that curiosity itself feeds the media frenzy that turns real people into symbols, villains or spectacle.

I tried to deal with that tension by choosing one lens and sticking with it. One podcast. One perspective. Listening made something very clear: how extraordinarily hard it is to convict someone.

Even with a huge body of evidence laid out, doubt creeps in through the gaps. What-ifs. Alternative explanations. Missing certainty. By the time the evidence wrapped up (at least the evidence I was exposed to), I had no confidence that if I were on the jury, I’d know what to do.

Reading The Mushroom Tapes later, away from the intensity of the daily news cycle, brought that discomfort back. Were we watching a trial by jury, or a trial by media? And how much did the wider commentary shape what we believed about the woman at the centre of it all?

What the Book is Really Doing

The Mushroom Tapes isn’t a neat recap of evidence. Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein don’t try to resolve the case or land on answers.

Instead, they sit together in the mess.

They talk. They circle. They reflect. Themes surface and resurface: love, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, nourishment, poisoning, mycology and murder. The legal facts sit alongside the much stranger reality of human behaviour.

The book asks why this case gripped so many of us, and what comfort we take in horror that happens to ‘someone else’. It touches on motherhood and the unsettling closeness of nourishment and harm. It explores the history of women’s crimes being associated with poisoning, and what that says about power, desperation and control.

And there is the uncomfortable schadenfreude of watching someone who appears to be losing control of their life, or perhaps their mind, while we sit safely outside, judging and speculating.

The Jurors We Never Hear From

One image that stayed with me was that of the ‘spare’ juror.

The person who sits through the entire trial absorbs every detail, carries the same emotional weight, and then is sent home just as deliberations begin. Present for everything, excluded from the final act.

Jurors shoulder a profound civic responsibility and then are expected to carry it silently. They don’t get to process the experience publicly. They don’t share the language that forms inside the jury room with anyone outside it.

Close quarters. Repetition. Emotional intensity. Responsibility for a verdict. That combination forges a bond - a shared understanding that people outside the room simply cannot access.

And that is where this stopped being just about a trial for me.

Communitas in the Courtroom

Helen Garner references anthropologist Victor Turner and his idea of communitas: a form of community that emerges in liminal, in-between spaces where normal structures are suspended.

Turner described liminality as the phase in a ritual where people step outside their usual roles. In that suspension, hierarchy softens and a brief sense of deep equality and shared humanity can emerge.

Communitas is not everyday teamwork. It is intense, temporary, and often formed under pressure.

And once you see it there, it’s hard not to see it elsewhere.

How this Shows Up in Projects

Large systems and change projects create their own liminal spaces.

People step out of business-as-usual and into project rooms, working groups and war rooms.

Normal hierarchies blur.

People from buying, planning, finance, IT, retail operations and supply chain grapple with problems that few others in the organisation fully understand - the kind of environment where leadership in project management is tested in real time.

The project becomes the thing. It bonds people - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse - in much the same way a trial bonds a jury.

Handled with care, that shared experience can create a powerful sense of community that lasts well beyond go-live and shapes how people work together on the next piece of change.

Handled badly, it leaves people depleted, unheard, or quietly resentful.

What Project Leaders Can Take From This

Projects will feel hard at times. That’s unavoidable. But there are ways to make better use of the liminal space they create.

1. Honour the Liminal Space

Projects are not business-as-usual. Pretending they are just makes things weird.

Name the fact that this is temporary. An in-between state with different pressures, rhythms and expectations.

Create rituals that help people process what they’re seeing as well as doing the work: short stand-ups, regular sense-making sessions, clear rhythms for decisions and reflection.

When leaders don’t name the liminal space, people fill the gap with anxiety - a familiar pattern when leading through uncertainty.

2. Build Real Communitas, Not Performance

Communitas is not forced team-building.

It comes from honest conversation about what’s confusing, unsettling or hard - not just the good news that gets polished on its way to steering committees.

Make space for cross-functional relationships to form in the day-to-day work, not just at kick-offs or off-sites.

In our work with retailers, the projects that go best are the ones where a cross functional project structure is supported by early governance conversations, not postponed until after go-live.

3. Watch For the ‘Spare Jurors’

In every project, there are people who carry weight without a real voice.

They attend everything. They do the heavy lifting. And then decisions happen elsewhere.

Map who is in the room when decisions are made, and who is living with the consequences outside it. This is where decision-making in project management becomes visible - not in frameworks, but in who is heard and who is not.

Bring those ‘spare jurors’ into feedback loops and decision-shaping conversations, even if final accountability sits elsewhere. Acknowledging experience matters, particularly when responsibility in project management is unevenly distributed.

4. Treat narrative as a design issue

Trials are battles of narrative: prosecution, defence and media telling different versions of the same incomplete story.

Projects are no different.

People rarely resist systems. They resist the story that the system tells about their future.

Be explicit about the narrative: why this system, why now, and what will change for different parts of the business.

Keep that story consistent across updates, town halls and vendor conversations. Adjust the language, not the core meaning - a discipline closely tied to accountability in project management.

A Final Thought

If you’re leading a systems project and can feel the pressure of competing narratives, scrutiny and that strange in-between phase, it may help to stop treating the project as a checklist.*

Treat it more like a shared rite of passage.

Those moments shape people more than the system ever will.

If you want to talk about how to design projects that build trust, shared language and momentum (and deliver the scope), that’s a conversation I’m always happy to have.

*Not that I am anti-checklist, I have plenty of them - they are a starting point, not the end game.

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