The squeak of a dry-erase marker against a glass wall is a specific kind of torture. It’s high-pitched, rhythmic, and ultimately meaningless when the person holding the marker is drawing a ‘vision map’ that will be erased by the janitorial staff at 9:05 PM tonight. We were 165 minutes into a ‘Blue Sky Innovation Retreat,’ and the air in the conference room had taken on that stale, over-caffeinated quality of people pretending to be inspired. There were 25 of us, each handed a stack of neon sticky notes, tasked with ‘disrupting our own core competencies.’
I watched a senior VP write the word ‘Synergy’ on a lime-green square and slap it onto the glass with the misplaced confidence of a man who believes he’s just invented fire. We all knew what was happening. We’ve all been there. It’s the performance of progress. It is the ceremony we conduct to appease the gods of modern management, ensuring that while the world changes outside our tinted windows, we remain safely cocooned in a series of collaborative exercises that lead nowhere.
My mind drifted to the smell of char. Earlier that evening, while I was trapped on a preparatory Zoom call for this very meeting, I had managed to burn a $45 lasagna beyond recognition. I was so busy nodding at a slide deck about ‘operational agility’ that I ignored the physical reality of smoke billowing
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