The Corporate Ritual

The cap is off the dry-erase marker, and the squeak it’s making against the whiteboard is the only sound proving I haven’t died and gone to some beige, low-pile-carpet version of hell. There are 6 of us in the room. The air is thick with the smell of lukewarm coffee and the specific kind of corporate desperation that precedes a long weekend. Our facilitator, a man whose title is ‘Chief Agility Officer’-a role invented just 46 days ago-draws a wobbly circle. Inside it, he writes ‘Synergy.’

I’d pitched my idea 26 minutes earlier. It was simple. Maybe too simple. It was about fixing a broken checkout process that was costing us an estimated $876 per hour in abandoned carts. It was a plumbing problem, not a poetry problem. I had data. I had a step-by-step plan. I had a clear ROI calculated over the next two quarters.

Silence. Not a hostile silence, but a far more terrifying one. A deep, profound, incomprehending silence. The kind you get when you ask a cat to explain its position on monetary policy. Then, a colleague named Marcus, who wears sneakers that cost more than my first car, leans forward with the gravity of a man about to solve world hunger.

And just like that, my practical, profitable idea was dead. Murdered in cold blood by a volley of buzzwords fired from the hip.

A Feature, Not a Bug

For years, I believed these meetings were just poorly run. A failure of process. I thought if we just had a better facilitator, clearer rules, or fewer markers that squeaked like dying rodents, we could actually get somewhere. I was wrong. I was profoundly, fundamentally wrong. My mistake was assuming the goal of the meeting was to find the best idea. I once meticulously planned one of these sessions for a previous employer. I brought in colored sticky notes, set a timer for each activity, and enforced a ‘no bad ideas’ rule with the zeal of a fresh convert. I really thought I was doing it right. We generated 136 distinct concepts. The team was buzzing. Then the department head walked in, glanced at our beautiful mosaic of innovation, and said, “Great work, everyone. We’ll be moving forward with the project I outlined last month.” He just needed to show that he’d listened.

The real purpose isn’t to generate new ideas, but to neutralize them. Especially the dangerous ones. The ones that are simple, effective, and don’t require a multi-million-dollar consulting package.

It threatens existing power structures, job titles, and budgets. It suggests that the way things have been done is no longer the best way. For someone who has built a career on ‘the way things are done,’ this is not a welcome message. So, the organization develops an immune response: the ‘Innovation Workshop.’ It’s an elaborate pantomime that inoculates the company against actual change.

Hazel G.’s Practicality

My driving instructor, Hazel G., would have hated that room. Hazel was a woman of terrifying practicality. She was probably 66 years old and had the calm, unblinking patience of a granite cliff. When I was learning to parallel park, I kept trying to find a ‘holistic’ feel for it. I was trying to ‘innovate’ my way into the parking spot. Hazel let me fail exactly 6 times before she finally sighed, tapped the steering wheel, and said,

No synergy. No buzzwords. No brainstorming. Just a brutally effective, repeatable algorithm. She wasn’t building my parking confidence; she was giving me a tool that worked every single time. And that’s the difference. Real progress isn’t about generating a cloud of possibilities; it’s about finding a clear, effective process and executing it. It’s often boring. It’s almost never sexy. It doesn’t look good on a whiteboard covered in circles and arrows. It’s just work.

Plumbers vs. Poets

I think about Hazel a lot. I think about how much business is just people trying to find a magical, holistic way to parallel park, because the simple, proven method feels beneath them. I once sat in a 6-hour meeting about revamping our international contractor payment system. The proposal on the table involved a custom-built platform with blockchain integration, AI-powered expense verification, and a projected budget of $496,000. It was a masterpiece of innovation theater. What the contractors actually needed was just a reliable way to get paid on time, in their local currency, without losing a huge chunk to fees. Instead of engineering a space shuttle to go to the grocery store, what if the solution was just… simpler? What if we could provide a tool that’s universally accepted and easy to manage, like a Visa gift card that they can use for their expenses without the bureaucratic overhead?

The silence that followed my suggestion was the same one I’d heard before. It was the sound of a simple truth colliding with a complex fantasy.

My problem is that I am, in my heart, a plumber. I see a leak and I want to fix it. The corporate world, however, is often run by poets who are more interested in writing an ode to the beauty of the water damage. It’s a difficult thing to accept that sometimes, people don’t actually want the problem solved. They want to be seen as the kind of person who is thinking about solving the problem in a very important and impressive way. Solving it robs them of a talking point. Fixing the leak means you can’t talk about the leak anymore.

The Unsaid Truth & Acceptance

There’s this conversation I rehearsed in my head on the drive home from that meeting. It’s the one where I don’t just sit there quietly after my idea gets vaporized. In this version, I look the Chief Agility Officer in the eye and say,

But I never said it. Of course, I didn’t. Because another part of the theater is that you must pretend the emperor’s blockchain-powered clothes are beautiful.

I have a confession. I used to think I was above it all. I thought the problem was them, not me. But I’ve learned that the most insidious part of innovation theater is that it works. It’s frustrating, it’s soul-crushing, but it successfully protects the system. It’s a perfectly designed machine for maintaining the status quo. My early frustration was based on the premise that the machine was broken. My current, more weary perspective is that it’s working perfectly. It’s just not designed to do what it claims to do.