The squeak of a chisel-tip marker against a glass whiteboard is the official anthem of a progress that isn’t moving. I’m standing near the back of the room, leaning against a glass partition that separates this high-stakes ‘War Room’ from a 375 gallon saltwater tank I’m supposed to be scrubbing.
Inside the tank, a yellow tang is picking at a piece of algae with more genuine purpose and strategic intent than the 25 executives currently huddling around a wall of neon paper. They call this a ‘Design Thinking Sprint.’ I call it a very expensive way to kill a Tuesday afternoon while pretending we are changing the world.
The facilitator, a man whose teeth are so blindingly white they look like they’ve been bleached by the same fluorescent light reflecting off the whiteboard, is currently shouting ‘No bad ideas!’ while frantically grouping sticky notes into clusters. One note says ‘Metaverse Synergy.’ Another suggests ‘AI-Powered Coffee Machine.’ I watched a commercial for a brand of fabric softener this morning that made me weep for 15 minutes because it showed a grandmother hugging a sweater that smelled like her late husband, and yet here, surrounded by the supposed pinnacle of human ‘innovation,’ I feel like a cold, jagged stone. There is a profound lack of humanity in these rituals. They are scripts written by people who are terrified of the very thing they claim to be seeking. We aren’t innovating; we are performing a liturgy to appease the gods of the quarterly report.
Insight 1: The Safety Net of Process
Innovation theater is a term we use to feel smart about our collective cynicism, but the reality is much more depressing than a simple waste of time. It is a sophisticated defense mechanism. If a company actually changed the way its supply chain functioned, 15 middle managers might lose their perceived utility.
So, instead of changing, we buy the sticky notes. We spend $2225 on organic catering. We hire the guy with the white teeth and the $855 per hour consulting rate to tell us that we are ‘disruptors.’ It’s a safe outlet for creativity that is designed, specifically and structurally, to have no consequence.
I’ve spent the last 15 years as an aquarium maintenance diver, which means I spend a lot of time looking at the world through two inches of acrylic. From that perspective, you see the distortions. You see how people look when they think no one is watching. In these workshops, I see people who are exhausted. They are tired of the 55-minute meetings that lead to more meetings. They are tired of the 125 percent effort they are asked to give for projects that will be archived in a SharePoint folder by Friday. There was a woman in the front row today, her name tag said Sarah, who spent 45 minutes drawing a very detailed flower on the edge of her notepad while the facilitator talked about ‘pivoting toward a digital-first ecosystem.’ She knew. We all knew. The flower was the only real thing in the room.
The Necessity of Destruction
True innovation is a messy, violent process. It requires the destruction of something old to make room for the new. It’s the biological equivalent of a forest fire-frightening, hot, and necessary for the health of the ecosystem. But corporations hate fire. They want the growth without the burn. They want the ‘breakthrough’ without the ‘break.’ So they create these controlled environments, these thematic parks of thought, where we can play with the idea of revolution without ever having to pick up a metaphorical brick.
The Responsibility of Living Things
I remember a job I had cleaning a tank at a major tech firm in the city. They had 45 different ‘Innovation Pods’ scattered throughout the office, each one filled with beanbag chairs and vintage arcade machines. Not once in the 15 weeks I worked there did I see someone actually building a prototype or testing a hypothesis. They were always just talking about the *process* of building. They were talking about the ‘velocity’ of their ‘sprints.’ It’s the same way I see people approach their aquariums sometimes. They want the aesthetic of a reef, not the responsibility of a living thing. When the first sign of hair algae appears, they don’t want to get their hands wet; they want to buy a chemical that promises a ‘synergistic solution’ to the problem.
Precision Over Performance
In the world of luxury and precision, this performative nonsense stands out even more starkly. You cannot ‘brainstorm’ your way into a perfectly ground optical lens. You cannot ‘disrupt’ the physics of light with a colorful piece of adhesive paper. Real progress is often quiet, iterative, and incredibly boring to witness. It’s the thousands of hours spent in a laboratory testing the refractive index of a new composite material. It’s the commitment to a standard of excellence that doesn’t care about your ‘synergy.’
This is why I find retinal screening so fascinating in contrast to these corporate circuses. They have integrated high-end technology like ZEISS diagnostic tools not because it’s a buzzword to put on a slide deck, but because it actually changes the diagnostic outcome for the human being sitting in the chair. It’s a tangible, physical integration of technology and style that serves a purpose. There is no ‘theater’ in a vision care lab; there is only the objective reality of whether or not a person can see clearly.
Why are we so afraid of clarity? I think it’s because clarity brings accountability. If we can see exactly what is wrong, we are obligated to fix it. The ‘Innovation Workshop’ is a fog machine. It creates just enough haze to make the old, broken structures look like they might be something new if you squint hard enough. I’ve seen 75 different versions of the same ‘Breakthrough Idea’ over the years, and they all end up in the same place: the trash can in the hallway, covered in half-eaten sandwiches and lukewarm coffee.
The sticky note is the tombstone of a thought that wasn’t allowed to live.
Confession: Maintaining the Illusion
I have a confession to make. I am part of the problem. As I scrub the calcium deposits off the glass, I am essentially maintaining the theater. I am making sure the backdrop is clean so the actors can perform their roles without distraction. If the tank was dirty, if the water was murky, it might ruin the ‘vibe’ of the innovation session. People might start to realize that they are sitting in a room that smells slightly of fish and stagnant water. My job is to provide the illusion of a pristine environment where ‘clear thinking’ can happen, even though the clearest thing in the room is the water in the tank, and no one is looking at it.
The Honest Interruption
I once saw a man in one of these sessions get genuinely angry. He was an engineer, probably in his late 55s, with calloused hands and a shirt that had a faint stain of machine oil on the pocket. He stood up while the facilitator was talking about ‘leveraging the cloud’ and said, ‘The cloud is just someone else’s computer, and our computers don’t talk to the machines on the floor because we haven’t updated the firmware in 15 years.’ The room went silent. You could hear the hum of the aquarium filters. It was the most honest thing said in that room in 35 days. The facilitator smiled, wrote ‘Legacy Systems’ on a neon orange sticky note, and moved on to the next topic. The engineer sat down, and I saw the light go out of his eyes. He had tried to introduce a real problem into the theater, and the theater simply absorbed it, categorized it, and neutralized it.
Sometimes I think about what would happen if I just broke the glass. If I took my 15-pound scraper and shattered the partition between the ‘War Room’ and the 375 gallons of saltwater. The water would rush out, soaking the $4555 ergonomic chairs and drowning the piles of sticky notes. The executives would have to scramble onto the tables. The yellow tang would be flopping on the carpet. It would be a disaster. It would be messy. It would be expensive. But for at least 5 minutes, everyone in that room would be experiencing the same, undeniable reality. They wouldn’t be ‘ideating’ about a crisis; they would be *in* one. And in that moment, I bet they would find some actual innovation. Someone would find a bucket. Someone would call for help. Someone would try to save the fish. The theater would be over, and the work would begin.
The Price of the Stage
MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE ILLUSION
70% MAINTAINED
But I won’t break the glass. I’ll just keep scrubbing. I have a mortgage that costs me $2345 a month and a cat that needs expensive specialized food. I am a supporting character in the drama of modern industry.
They’ll all leave, feeling a strange mixture of relief and emptiness, and I’ll be left alone with the fish. Real innovation doesn’t need a facilitator. It doesn’t need a specific brand of marker or a room with a ‘creative’ name like ‘The Hive’ or ‘The Incubator.’ It needs a problem that someone actually cares about solving. It needs the courage to look at a 15-year-old process and say, ‘This is stupid, and we should stop doing it.’ It needs the precision of a craftsman and the honesty of a diver who knows that if he makes a mistake, the pressure won’t forgive him. Until we are willing to trade the theater for the truth, we’re just playing with paper in a room full of expensive shadows.
The Clarity Below the Surface
I look at the yellow tang one last time before I pack up my gear. He doesn’t need a brainstorm. He just needs to see clearly. And maybe, if we stopped talking about seeing clearly and actually looked at the world, we might find that the answers weren’t on the sticky notes at all. They were right there, under the surface, waiting for someone to be brave enough to get their hair wet.
