THIS IS KILLING YOUR COMPANY
Innovation Theater and Management Masks
The uncomfortable truth about innovation
I was having coffee with a CEO recently when she leaned forward and whispered, "Can I tell you something I've never admitted to anyone? I have no idea what innovation actually means anymore."
That's the thing about buzzwords — they eventually become so overused they collapse under their own weight. And nowhere is this more true than in the world of corporate innovation.
This conversation with professor Alf Rehn got me thinking about something he provocatively calls "innovation apartheid" — the tendency to separate "real innovation" (the shiny, disruptive, moonshot projects) from all those "lesser" improvements happening on the factory floor or in back-office processes.
Here's the thing: that separation is complete bullshit.
One of the stories Alf shared hit me right between the eyes. He talked about some students who apologetically presented a project to Lego about plastic reuse efficiency that might improve their process by "only" 6%. When the Lego exec heard this number, he was stunned. "Do you have any idea how enormous 6% is for us? Do you have any comprehension of our scale?"
That's the reality most innovation consultants don't want to talk about. The unglamorous, incremental improvements that never make it to the board room are often creating more actual value than the big, splashy innovation centers with their bean bags and brainstorming walls.
Innovation isn't what you think it is
The uncomfortable truth? Most of us are performing innovation rather than actually doing it.
When Alf talked about "innovation theater," I nearly spit out my coffee. What a perfect term for companies creating the appearance of innovation without the substance. He described visiting banks with fancy fintech accelerators that weren't even allowed to talk to the rest of the bank due to "compliance issues." They existed solely so executives could point and say, "See? We're innovative too!"
This kind of corporate theater isn't harmless. It's actively destructive because it:
Burns resources on signaling rather than substance
Creates parallel structures that never infiltrate the core business
Teaches employees that appearance matters more than outcomes
Discourages the everyday, incremental innovations that create real value
What bothers me most about this is how we've turned innovation into another form of status-seeking. The small, valuable process improvement gets ignored because it doesn't look cool in the annual report. The 6% efficiency gain gets overshadowed by the innovation lab that hasn't produced anything useful in three years.
But here's the twist: the people on the floor know the difference. They know which improvements actually matter and which ones are just for show.
The lonely weight of leadership
There's a moment from Alf's career that keeps coming back to me. As a 32-year-old newly-minted professor, he received a late-night call from a hardened CEO who'd just closed down a factory in a small town. The man was slightly drunk and fighting back tears.
"The only thing I can think about," the CEO said, "is that there are hundreds of families where parents are crying right now and their children don't understand why."
The raw vulnerability of that moment reveals something we rarely discuss: leadership is profoundly lonely. This tough-as-nails executive couldn't share his pain with his board, his management team, or even his family. Instead, he called a young academic he barely knew.
Wait, that can't be right... can it?
But it is. In fact, it's shockingly common. Behind closed doors, leaders carry crushing emotional burdens they feel they can't share. They make decisions that harm real people with real lives. They wrestle with impossible trade-offs. And then they put on a brave face and act like they've got it all figured out.
Why? Because that's what leadership is supposed to look like.
Except it's not. The mask becomes the prison.
The uncanny valley of fake empathy
Alf talked about leaders who try to perform empathetic leadership when it's not authentic to who they are. The result? Something he describes as "creepy" — and I couldn't agree more.
It reminds me of the "uncanny valley" effect in video games, where characters that look almost-but-not-quite human become disturbing instead of relatable. There's a similar effect with leadership — we can sense when someone is trying to perform the role rather than inhabit it.
The irony is crushing: by trying to appear more perfect, many leaders become less effective. By hiding vulnerability, they miss the chance to build genuine trust.
I've worked with plenty of executives, and here's what I've noticed: the ones who make the biggest impact aren't the ones with the perfect LinkedIn profiles or the polished presentations. They're the ones who can admit they don't have all the answers. The ones who can say "I screwed up" or "I'm not sure" or even "I'm scared too."
That's not weakness. It's the foundation of actual strength.
The creativity paradox
When we talked about AI, Alf dropped a phrase that's been haunting me for days: "mediocrity engines."
It's the perfect description of what's happening as generative AI becomes more integrated into our work. Good enough is becoming the standard. Excellence is becoming the exception.
During our conversation, Alf explained what he's seeing in academia: the truly terrible student submissions have disappeared (thanks, ChatGPT), but so have the truly excellent ones. Everything is converging toward the middle. Toward adequacy. Toward... mediocrity.
I'm seeing the same thing on LinkedIn. Everyone's content looks the same now because it's all created by the same underlying models. It's clean, grammatically correct, and utterly forgettable.
Why real creativity is still hard work
The thing about true creativity is that it's never been about having the initial idea. Ideas are easy. What's hard is the painful, messy process of developing that idea into something real.
Alf talked about how artists work — they don't just wait for inspiration to strike. They sketch, tear it up, try again, mix things up, tear it up again. Writers don't just sit down and produce their masterpiece in one go. They write, delete, rewrite, throw it all away, start fresh, keep two sentences from the original draft, build something new around them.
It's work. Hard, frustrating, ego-bruising work.
And that's precisely what AI can't do. It can't look at its own output and think, "This is garbage, but these two sentences have something special in them." It can't feel dissatisfied with good enough. It can't decide to tear everything down and start over.
That's still our job. And it's going to be more important than ever.
The mental health elephant in the room
Toward the end of our conversation, Alf mentioned something that stopped me in my tracks: a recent US study found that 89% of respondents reported experiencing mental health issues in the past year.
That's not a problem. That's a crisis.
And yet, we spend almost no time equipping leaders to recognize mental health issues — in themselves or in their teams. We'd rather talk about frameworks and methodologies than feelings and psychological safety.
Then Alf threw out one of those ideas that sounds completely radical until you think about it for five minutes: what if we fired half our middle managers and hired psychologists instead? What if instead of having untrained managers trying to help with work-life balance and mental health, we actually had experts?
It's one of those ideas that sounds crazy until you really think about it. Then it starts to sound like common sense.
So what?
After talking with Alf, I can't stop thinking about how we need to rethink some fundamental assumptions:
Innovation isn't about looking innovative — it's about creating actual value, whether that comes from a fancy AI project or a 6% efficiency improvement on the factory floor
Leadership isn't about having all the answers — it's about having the courage to admit when you don't, and creating space for others to contribute
Creativity isn't about generating ideas — it's about doing the hard work of refinement, questioning, and sometimes starting over
AI won't replace human thinking — but it might replace mediocre thinking, which means excellence and originality become more valuable than ever
Mental health isn't a personal issue — it's a strategic one that directly impacts performance, innovation, and leadership
The lingering question
There's something about our conversation that I still can't quite shake. When Alf described the "good old days" of business, he painted a picture of wilder, more eccentric environments where unusual risks were taken and personalities allowed to be a bit weird.
I wonder: have we sanitized the workplace to the point where true innovation becomes impossible? Innovation — real innovation — is messy. It's uncomfortable. It challenges assumptions. It asks difficult questions. It sometimes comes from unlikely places.
Can we create that kind of environment in our increasingly polished, politically correct, AI-enhanced workplaces? Can we make space for the odd, the eccentric, the slightly dangerous thinkers? Or are we doomed to an ever-more-homogenized future of good-enough ideas and leaders who look perfect but accomplish nothing?
I don't have the answer. But I think it's a question worth asking.
If you found this valuable, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you haven't read my book, "The Execution Revolution," it's available wherever books are sold. It's a practical handbook for driving real change in your organization — not just talking about it.
