Trust is fragile, but loyalty is blind. When the two collide, progress and paralysis duel for dominance.
Every system built on human judgement — politics, business, design — eventually drifts from substance toward spectacle. Perception becomes easier to measure than integrity, and optics offer a faster route to reassurance than outcomes ever could. The illusion of competence becomes the currency of credibility.
We reward presence over proof, confidence over clarity. Meetings become stages, metrics become mirrors, and dashboards glow with the theatre of progress. In a culture that equates visibility with validity, the true measure of success is no longer what we do, but how convincingly we appear to be doing it.
This is the UX of competence: a design pattern for survival within systems that prize spectacle over substance. The more we optimise for visibility, the more invisible the truth becomes.
Scenario: Cameras Don't Lie
The studio lights are unforgiving — bright enough to expose every pore, but soft enough to flatter the illusion of composure. A political commentator known for her pragmatism sits beneath them rehearsing lines she doesn’t quite believe.
Outside the studio, a storm is already brewing: a group of parents have accused local schools of “indoctrinating” children about gender identity. What began as a Facebook post has spiralled through talk radio and tabloids into tonight’s national panel — the latest round in Britain’s endless culture war.
Within minutes, civility evaporates. Voices rise. Every statistic becomes a weapon. Every interruption, a point scored. And somewhere between the applause signs and the autocues, the debate stops being about children and starts being about credibility.
The commentator feels the trap closing on her. The cameras aren’t hunting truth — they’re hunting theatre. She can either speak to the sentiment and keep her tribe’s loyalty intact, or she can risk nuance, and watch the room turn on her.
The camera doesn’t lie — it simply records what’s in front of it. The deception is elsewhere: in framing, in delivery, in the choreography of certainty.
When truth becomes a performance, sincerity turns into stagecraft. The broadcast isn’t a conversation; it’s an audition for credibility. Every gesture is calibrated, every pause a strategic silence designed to appear unscripted.
But while the show feels spontaneous, its architecture is entirely predictable. The cycle repeats across boardrooms, classrooms, and comment sections alike — anywhere visibility is mistaken for validity.
What we see on-screen is only the clearest expression of a much older pattern: the human instinct to design belief. The following talking points unpack that design — how we construct, reward, and rationalise the performance of competence until it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing.
The Performance of Perception
Trust doesn’t emerge from truth; it emerges from consistency. We learn to recognise legitimacy not by what someone is, but by how reliably they appear. Erving Goffman called this impression management — the social choreography that sustains credibility through controlled exposure.
In institutional life, that choreography has become the operating system. Politicians rehearse empathy, CEOs rehearse transparency, and designers rehearse humility. The goal is no longer to be good, but to appear reliably interpretable as good. Predictability becomes virtue; visibility becomes verification.
This is why mediocrity can feel trustworthy and innovation suspicious. The former signals familiarity — a safe bet within the rules of the performance. The latter introduces uncertainty, which in a culture addicted to certainty reads as incompetence.
Our commentator chose her words carefully because in a performative system, deviation looks like defection. Legitimacy isn’t earned through integrity but maintained through alignment. To belong, you must perform the part your audience expects to see.
Competence as Choreography
All competence is performative; not all performance is competent.
The phrase Performative Competence sounds like an insult — as though performance cheapens substance. In truth, it describes something vital: the ability to translate expertise into experience, to make knowledge legible to others. Performance, in this sense, is not pretence but practice made visible.
Yet the paradox persists. In systems governed by optics, fluency outruns understanding. We mistake confidence for clarity and presentation for progress. It isn’t deception — it’s adaptation. Organisations reward whatever can be seen to work, not necessarily what does.
True competence involves friction: doubt, iteration, and uncomfortable truths. But these don’t photograph well. They appear uncertain, off-brand, and therefore risky. So we filter them out, and in doing so, we filter out evidence of genuine learning.
The result is an ecosystem of polished dysfunction. Teams optimise for presentations over prototypes; institutions prioritise reports over refactors. In this theatre, failure becomes a PR problem instead of a data point.
Our commentator understood this instinctively: to look competent, she had to perform certainty even as she questioned the premise. The tragedy is that the performance works so well that over time, even the performers forget it’s all an act.
The Metrics of Meaning
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law wasn’t written for politics or product management, but it may as well have been. Once visibility becomes the scoreboard, systems start optimising for the look of success rather than the substance of it.
Dashboards, OKRs, follower counts — each begins as a proxy for progress and ends as a performance. Metrics are meant to translate reality into something legible, yet in practice they incentivise distortion. The story they tell must be positive, or it risks jeopardising budgets, bonuses, or belief.
This is how improvement turns into inflation. Targets stretch, definitions blur, and suddenly everyone is performing progress while quietly lowering the bar. The signal becomes self-referential: metrics validate perception, perception justifies metrics.
Our commentator’s televised argument is no different. The applause meter, the engagement spike, the trending clip — all reinforce the illusion of impact. Measurable noise substitutes for meaningful dialogue. And when the game rewards the loudest signal, silence (reflection, nuance, doubt) becomes a liability.
A system cannot reform itself while its incentives remain performative. Until we measure what matters — or more prudently, admit that not everything that matters can be measured — visibility will continue to masquerade as validity.
Conclusion
Communication is never neutral; every signal enters a system that rewards attention over understanding. Whatever it is you have to say, you have a responsibility for how it’s interpreted — and how it can be weaponised.
We’ve built cultures where credibility is conferred by performance, and performance is rewarded by noise. The result is a loop of self-reinforcing spectacle: the more convincingly we appear to care, the less incentive we have to change anything at all.
Real progress is quieter. It doesn’t trend. It happens in the pauses between the performances — the moments when we stop rehearsing certainty long enough to confront what’s true.
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
A lie for a lie leaves everyone convinced.
The only way to restore trust is to prize truth over theatre, substance over spectacle. Until then, we remain trapped in systems that confuse sincerity with strategy.
Behavioural Principles
The UX of Performative Competence
- Signal before substance In systems obsessed with visibility, the appearance of clarity often substitutes for clarity itself.
- Perform to communicate, not to convince Performance is not pretence when used to make knowledge legible — but it becomes manipulation when used to win.
- Measure what matters, not what flatters Metrics should illuminate truth, not simulate it. Every shortcut towards certainty distorts what it claims to define.
- Design for sincerity Authenticity can be choreographed, but it cannot be faked. Create systems that reward honesty over optics.
- Remember: all competence is performative; not all performance is competent The goal is not to stop performing — it’s to perform with purpose.
